The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned to read the world before she learned to read words— coastlines like unfinished sentences, mountain ranges the color of old bruises.

Her father's hands moved over paper the way hands move over sleeping faces, tender and making something permanent of what was already there.

She inherited his silence and his instruments. The brass compass, green at its hinges. The habit of standing at windows to see which way smoke leans.

Now she draws the maps herself— not of places but of the distances between them, the unmeasured water where the chart goes white and her father's handwriting ends.

Something accumulates in blank space. She fills it with what she knows: the weight of an atlas left open on a table, light moving across it all afternoon like a hand tracing the way home.