The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world through her father's hands— the way he traced coastlines like a man recalling something he had lost. Every edge a scar. Every border a sentence left unfinished.

In his study the maps were layered, geological, each decade pressing itself into the one before. She would lift them by their corners as if lifting the lids of sleeping things.

He named mountains by their shadows. Taught her that the blank spaces were not emptiness but a kind of patience— the land waiting to be misunderstood by someone who needed it to mean something.

Now she makes her own maps. They are full of errors, which is to say they are full of her. The cities drift. The rivers run toward wherever she is standing.