The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherited his drafting tools — the compass that smelled of brass and old decisions, the ink that bled into whatever it touched.

She learned to name things only after she had lost them: the creek that dried before she found its source, the village that had moved while she was drawing roads.

Maps, he told her, are always of the past. You press the land to paper like a flower — what you hold is what it was, not what it is.

She draws the coastline anyway, lets the water eat a little more each year, marks erosion as a feature, not a flaw.

Somewhere in the margin of her latest work she draws the house they lived in — roof first, the way you see it vanishing when you leave.