The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherited her father's hands — the long fingers that knew how to press a continent into a single breath of ink, that could fold a border into something small enough to carry in a coat pocket.

All winter she traced his coastlines with one finger, the way children read by touching each word. The bays curved under her touch like the spines of sleeping animals.

He had named one inlet after her mother — a private geography no atlas would print, only legible to those who knew what it meant when a man bent over a lamp until dawn.

Now she makes her own maps. They show nothing fixed — only the rivers that move, the roads that dissolve in rain, the cities that forget their own names.

She draws the edges last, always in pencil, as if the world might still change its mind about where it ends.