The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherited his drafting table, its surface scored with coastlines he no longer trusted, erasure marks like old tides under the vellum.

Every map he made was a country of guesses— the delta shifting each spring into new mouths, the mountain renamed for whoever held the pencil.

She learned early that the legend is not the land. That symbols are what we agree to leave out.

Now she draws the rooms of her childhood house from memory, the hallways longer than they were, the windows west-facing when they faced only the neighbor's fence.

What the hand knows, the eye corrects. What the eye forgets, the hand invents. She labels it all: here, the kitchen. Here, where he stood. Here, approximate shore.