The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherited his instruments but not his certainty— the brass compass that wobbles toward every iron thing, the rolled charts smelling of tobacco and old coastlines.

He believed a river could be fixed to paper. She watches the same river carve a new throat every season, abandoning its banks like a rumor.

In his margins, small notes: *unreliable here*, *silted over*, *ask the ferryman*. The ferryman is dead. The ferry has become a dock. The dock, a memory of planks.

She draws nothing. She folds his maps back along their creases until the mountains meet themselves, until the cities press their names together like palms.

What she keeps: the habit of standing at high ground, the way his hand would hover before it touched the page— that breath of hesitation, that small courtesy paid to a world still in the act of becoming.