The Cartographer of Lost Rooms

She keeps a ledger of the houses no one lives in anymore — the kitchen where her grandmother sang to soup, the attic of small thunder, the porch that buckled like a hymn.

Each night she drafts another floor plan in the margin of her sleep, naming the doorways for what passed through them: goodbye, hesitation, the bright knife of the sun at four o'clock.

Some rooms have no walls now, only the rumor of walls — a vase hovering where the table once was, a window of weather without glass, the cat asleep on the idea of a rug.

She has learned to walk through them without bumping into the missing. The body remembers the geometry the way a tongue remembers a tooth it lost in childhood, and still tests.

In the morning her hands smell of plaster and the sweet rot of old wood. She folds the maps into smaller maps. Somewhere a kettle whistles in a kitchen that has not yet been built.