The Cartographer's Daughter

She grew up tracing coastlines with the blunt end of her father's pen, learning that every edge is a kind of longing, the land reaching toward water it will never hold.

His maps named mountains after their shadows. She memorized the contours the way you memorize a face you know is leaving— by the places where the light gathers and goes still.

When he died, she inherited the unfinished ones: rivers with no source marked, cities floating in blank paper, the trembling authority of not yet known.

She draws now from the edge inward, filling silence with roads that lead to where she thinks he meant to go. The sea on all her maps runs warm. She gives the unnamed mountains their names.