The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherited his hands — the ones that trembled over coastlines he had never seen, filling blank edges with what he wished were true.

Every drawer held a different ocean. She learned to read the lie in legend boxes, how north is not a promise, only a convention.

Now she traces routes through cities where the street names have changed twice since someone thought to write them down. She moves through palimpsest, one hand always reaching for a wall that isn't there.

What her father never marked: the self shifting under its own longitude. The way a woman becomes unfamiliar standing in the kitchen of her childhood, holding a cup she once called hers.

She has started drawing the interior — not rooms but the distances between decisions, the tributaries of almost and instead. No scale. No legend. Just the faithful, useless effort of the line.