The Cartographer of Small Hours

The map she draws at 3 a.m. has no coastlines, only the soft terrain of what she cannot name— the room's held breath, the lamp's small jurisdiction.

She charts the distances between one word and the next, the silences that fatten like fruit no one remembers planting.

A river runs where the afternoon broke open, where something she had meant to say dissolved into the floorboards, into oak.

By morning the cartography is gone, folded back into the body's keeping, and she wakes to a world that trusts its edges.

But the map persists in muscle, in the slight hesitation before she speaks her own name— that pause the size of everything she knows.