The Cartographer's Daughter

She kept his maps the way some daughters keep the smell of tobacco in a coat— not folded, not framed, just spread across the table where the light could find them.

Every coastline was a guess made permanent. He'd drawn the bays from rumors, from the mouths of fishermen who'd drunk too much and still remembered where the rocks were.

She traced the inlets with one finger, learning the difference between the land he charted and the land that was. How margins fill with sea creatures when the known world ends.

Now she makes maps of other things— her daughter's face at seven, at thirteen, the exact blue of a hospital corridor, distance measured in the time it takes to forget.

The edges say here be dragons but she knows that's only shorthand for: beyond this point I could not follow.