The Cartographer of Lost Rooms

She draws the house from memory first — the kitchen with its yellow clock, a doorway that led somewhere she has not been in thirty years.

The pencil hesitates at the stairwell. Light fell there in certain slants, catching the dust like a held breath, and her mother passing through it as through weather.

She renders closets she never opened, a pantry with its jars of quiet, the cold seam where the floorboards met and always spoke when walked upon — small confession of a building.

Outside the window of the drawn house she adds a garden she invented. Here is the pear tree, here the bench, here the dog who lived three summers and is buried beneath the hyacinths.

The map is finished. She folds it twice, tucks it into the back of a book she will not open again this year, and the house inside her, finally, goes dark.