The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherited his hands — long-fingered, always reaching for the edge of things, pressing thumbs into coastlines as if to feel the cold come through.

His maps still curl in the hallway chest, their margins dense with notes in pencil, a language she has memorized but cannot speak aloud.

She draws her own now, starting from the center: the kitchen table, the window above the sink, the smell of rain on concrete that she cannot render in any scale.

Every map is an argument that the world can be held still long enough to be known. She traces roads her father never walked, and finds him there.

Some distances are not measured in miles. She folds the paper to a square, unfolds it, watches the creases hold their white, insistent light.