The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherits his drafting table, its surface scarred with meridians he pressed too hard, the ghost of coastlines no one travels now.

She traces the indentations like braille, reading the force of his certainty— how a man could press a continent into wood and believe it would hold.

His legend box: a small square kingdom where symbols translated the world. Blue for rivers. Hatching for mountains. Nothing for what cannot be named.

She makes her own marks now, lighter, provisional— places where she stopped and looked back, where the path forked into weather, where the land refused to be a line.

Outside, the city revises itself. A street she knew has become a courtyard. She notes this without grief, understanding at last that a map is only a record of attention, not a promise the world will stay.