The Cartographer of Lost Rooms

She drafts the houses she has lived in on tracing paper thinned by lamplight, each doorframe a small confession, each hallway widening toward a window she cannot quite remember closing.

The kitchens come back first — their tiles, the hum of an old refrigerator keeping vigil over plums. Then the bedrooms, blue with weather, where wallpaper bloomed and bloomed.

She labels nothing. The pencil knows. A staircase folds itself to fit the page. Somewhere, a piano nobody played leans against the eastern wall the way grief leans against a friend.

When the map is done, she lifts it to the light and sees, faint as breath, the floorplan of every house at once — a single, impossible architecture in which every room is hers, and empty,

and waiting for the lamp to be turned off so the shadows can move freely between the years like quiet animals returning, at last, to the rooms they have always known by heart.