The Cartographer of Abandoned Rooms

She maps the houses no one lives in anymore — draws the doorways where the light fell at four o'clock, marks each threshold with a small red x like a wound that has decided to stay open.

The kitchen where the radio kept playing after everyone had gone. The window above the sink, its warped glass bending the street into something almost gentle.

She says: a room holds the shape of what happened in it. Grief is just architecture. The way a staircase remembers the weight of someone climbing it in the dark.

She folds the maps and stores them in a tin that smells of cedar, old letters, winter. At night she traces her own hallways with one finger, learning what she carries.