The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherits his drafting table, the green lamp that pools light like standing water, the smell of linen paper and fixative still living in the grain.

His maps curl at the edges now, coastlines he never walked rendered in patient ink— each island named for what he feared to lose.

She traces the rivers with one finger, feeling where his pen hesitated, the slight tremor near the delta where he always doubted.

There are blank territories at the margins where he stopped, or could not go, and she understands that these, too, are a kind of knowledge.

She takes up the pen. The nib finds the paper. Whatever she draws next will not correct him— only continue, from the edge of what he knew.