The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world in layers — her father's desk a continent of paper, the smell of india ink rising like a tide.

She traced the rivers with her finger, not knowing rivers move, that every map is an argument with time.

Now she draws her own, the legend full of symbols no one taught her: the hatch-marks where she buried something, the dotted line she follows without knowing why.

Her father's maps are wrong the way all maps are wrong — precise and faithful to a world that kept on breathing after he set down the pen. She folds them anyway. She carries them.