The Cartographer's Daughter

She grew up folding the world into squares, her father's hands teaching her where the rivers bend away from themselves in shame.

Every coastline was a rumor he had verified— the blue ink drying on his fingers like small bruises, proof that distance could be owned.

She learned to distrust the legend, the neat symbols for church and ruin, how a forest could be rendered as a single green stamp.

What the maps never showed: the field her mother walked through every morning, the way it held the light as if asking a question.

Now she draws her own— the edges ragged, the scale uncertain, towns marked not by name but by what she lost there.