The Cartographer's Daughter

She traced her father's coastlines with one finger, the paper soft as skin where he had pressed his palms over the unnamed inlets, the provisional blue.

He mapped places he had never been— guessing at the curve of a bay from a sailor's letter, filling blank space with what seemed likely, calling this honest work.

She learned the shape of his omissions: how he drew roads to villages without marking where the road stopped, where the village had been burned, where no one thought to go back.

After he was gone she found the drafts, the versions he abandoned— towns erased, rivers rerouted, whole ranges of mountains pushed north into the margin. Every map a revision of an older grief.

Now she draws nothing. She walks without knowing where the water is. She trusts the land to hold her weight and does not ask what the land was called before.