The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world in thin paper layers, her father's hands smoothing coastlines flat the way a surgeon smooths a brow. Every shore a rumor, he said. Every border a guess held too long.

She grew up reading the white spaces, those silences between named towns where rivers nameless as cousins braided themselves through the foothills and no one had thought to mark them.

In the drawer beside his bed: half-finished maps, cities stalled at the edge of themselves, a mountain range that ends in pencil dust. She does not know if he ran out of time or if he left the edges soft on purpose.

Now she draws from memory— the smell of fresh linoleum in winter, the sound a screen door makes returning home. These too are territories. She traces them without a key.