The Cartographer of Forgotten Rooms

She drafts the houses no one lives in anymore, the kitchens where grandmothers stirred August into glass jars, the staircases that creak only in the dialect of their builders.

Her pencil knows the weight of a doorframe in a country that has changed its name twice. She measures the angle of afternoon light through a window that exists now only as a square of brighter wallpaper in someone's photograph.

The hallway, she writes, was narrower than memory allows. The wallpaper was not roses but a fainter thing — a pattern like wind moving through wheat, the kind you only see when leaving.

At night she folds the blueprints into birds and sets them on the sill. By morning they are gone, or they are still there, indistinguishable from the snow, indistinguishable from what she meant to say.