The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned to read rivers before words, her father's hands tracing watersheds the way other fathers read bedtime stories. Every border was a question mark, every coastline an argument with the sea.

He kept his mistakes in a drawer — islands that had drifted from their meridians, mountain ranges folded into themselves, cities he had placed too close to flood plains. She inherited the drawer.

Now she draws her own maps from memory: the kitchen where the linoleum buckled near the stove, the hallway that smelled of turpentine and coffee, the space between his chair and the window where the light arrived each afternoon like a rumor of warmth.

There are no legends for these territories. No scale that translates distance into grief. Only the blank margins where she still writes his name, then crosses it out, then writes it back again.