The Cartographer of Empty Rooms

She measures absence by the angle of light that crosses the floorboards at four, draws the slow geometry of dust where a chair once held its breath.

Each room is a country she has stopped naming. The kettle keeps its old habit of waking, the cupboard remembers a hand that no longer reaches for the blue cup.

Outside, the maples are practicing autumn, turning their pages too quickly to read. A neighbor's radio leaks the wrong decade into the hedge.

She sketches the staircase from below, the way a cathedral might sketch its own ribs— not to keep what is leaving, but to learn the shape of the leaving itself.

At dusk, the windows admit their small inheritance of stars. She closes the atlas. The house exhales into its own quiet weather.