The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world in increments — her father's hand moving the lamp across paper until the coastlines threw shadows like reaching fingers.

She memorized the blank spaces first, the unnamed rivers running off the edge, the mountains that existed only as someone's best approximation of white.

Now she folds every map she owns the wrong way, creasing what should stay flat, because certainty is a kind of lie her father never taught her to believe.

When she travels, she takes notes in the margins of whatever she finds — a church that isn't on any version, a road that stops mid-sentence in the grass.

She is making the map that includes being lost, the one her father almost drew the winter he sat at his table all night and pushed his instruments aside.