The Cartographer of Small Hours

She draws the map of 3 a.m. — that country with no borders, where the furniture looms large as monuments and the kitchen clock ticks in a language only grief speaks fluently.

The refrigerator hums its single note, a devotion to the ordinary. She marks it on her chart: *here, cold light, the smell of yesterday's rain still caught in the open window's hem.*

Somewhere a train is happening, far enough to be romantic, close enough to move the air. She plots its passage as a river flowing through the sleeping city's chest.

By dawn the map is always wrong — light erases the territories of dark, renames every street, insists on its version of the world. She folds her work and waits for night to give it back.