The Cartographer of Small Hours

Before the city remembers itself, a woman folds napkins by the window— each crease a meridian, each corner a cape no atlas names.

She has been charting this hour for years: the refrigerator's hum like a distant train, the blue bruise of light before sunrise spreading across the linoleum floor.

In the margin of a gas bill she draws the coastline of last Tuesday, the inlet where her daughter laughed over something already gone.

The cartographer knows all maps are elegies. You press the known world flat to hold it still, to say: here, this is where we were.

Dawn arrives as it always does— uninvited, with its ruinous light, erasing her careful latitudes, filling the room with the noise of beginning.