The Cartographer of Lost Hours

She maps the afternoons no one remembers — the wedge of light beneath a kitchen door, the held breath between two tea-kettle whistles, a sparrow's pause on the rust-rimmed sill.

Her ink is iron and rainwater. Her compass spins toward whatever is unfinished: a sentence dropped on a wooden floor, the blue half of a pear left to brown.

She charts the country no atlas claims — where Tuesdays go after they are spent, where the small clock of the wrist keeps its private weather, ticking out the names of rooms we have already left.

By morning, the page is salt and erasure. She folds the map into the shape of a bird, opens the window, and watches it fail beautifully, into the next forgetting.