The Cartographer of Small Hours

Before the city remembers itself, someone is already tracing the streets back to their first intentions— the alley that wanted to be a river, the square that dreamed of silence.

She moves with a lamp that changes what it touches. Cobblestones go amber. The locked bakery breathes through its vents and the whole block smells like an older year, one she cannot name but almost fits inside.

She marks the corners where no one stood but might have. Where a window once held a face that has since become someone else's memory, or no one's, drifting like pollen without a garden.

The map grows long before dawn arrives to complicate it. She folds it into her coat, against the place where the cold gets in— a chart of hours that will not stay found.