The Cartographer of Lost Rooms

She drew the kitchen first, where light arrived in slow geometries on linoleum, the kettle's small constellation of steam rising toward a ceiling she could not remember.

Then the hallway — its wallpaper of pale ferns unfurling between doorframes, the runner worn thin by the soft feet of decades, each thread a small biography of arrivals.

In the back bedroom, she paused. The window faced an orchard that may have been a parking lot, or a parking lot that dreamed itself an orchard, and she gave the dream the benefit of the pencil.

Last, she sketched the door she never opened, its brass knob cold as a coin pressed to the tongue, and beneath it, the thin shadow of a key she would carry in every house thereafter.