The Cartographer's Daughter

She kept his compasses in a shoebox— the ones that trembled before settling north, their needles worn to a fine blue hunger.

She learned to read contours the way others read faces: a tight ring of lines meaning pressure, meaning rise, the white spaces between them where nothing had been measured yet.

He mapped coastlines that no longer exist. Whole inlets swallowed by the century, the names he gave them still printed in atlases like the names of people no one remembers dying.

She moved to a city that was not on any of his maps. Walked its grid until she knew it by resistance— the corner where wind funnels from the north, the alley that smells of yeast and iron rain.

Now she draws the distance between her own hands. Marks the place where the scar curves east. Some territories, she thinks, can only be surveyed from the inside.