The Cartographer of Quiet

In the attic of noon, a woman unrolls silence like vellum, each crease a shoreline she once heard. Dust lifts in slow constellations, a soft atlas of things that do not speak yet leave coordinates.

She maps the hush behind a closing door, the pause between trains where the city holds its breath, a puddle on the stair that remembers the rain. Her pencil is a reed; it bends to the smallest weather.

At dusk, she pins a ribbon on the wall for the latitude of a name she can’t quite say. Light slips over it the way water memorizes stone, and the room becomes a harbor for unspoken arrivals.

When night folds the page, she lets the ink dry to the tempo of crickets outside the window. Tomorrow, she will chart a new silence— not empty, but full of the way we are held.