The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherited his hands first — the way they moved across a surface as if apologizing to it, tracing what was already there.

The maps he left were full of unnamed water. She learned to read the gaps as biography: here he doubted, here the light was bad, here something moved and he let it go.

She draws the town she grew up in from memory and finds it smaller than the streets deserve, the school compressed to a corner, her mother's house pushed to the edge where the paper ends.

What do we do with the places that made us when making us was all they had to give? She folds the map along its oldest crease and feels the paper give, a little, like a hand deciding to open.