Fiction

The Cartographer's Daughter and the Maps She Never Burned

She inherited two things from her father: his compulsion to name everything, and the knowledge that every map is also an erasure.

He had been a cartographer for the government — the kind that drew borders, not coastlines. The kind whose work, he used to say, was not about recording the world but deciding which version of it would become official.

They covered the floor in overlapping layers, each one a different decade, a different country, a different argument about where one thing ended and another began.