[Short Fiction] The Cartographer's Daughter

The maps her father made were never finished. She had grown up watching him revise them — coastlines amended in the night, small notations appearing in the margins about currents or gradients he had measured wrong the first time. The revision was not a failure, he had always told her. The revision was the point. When he died there were forty-three unfinished maps in his study. She inherited the house and the maps and the problem of what to do with both. She sold the house. The maps she carried to every apartment for the next eleven years, unrolled and re-rolled and stored in cardboard tubes labelled in his handwriting. *Northwest shelf, tidal correction applied.* *Southern delta, pre-drought survey.* *Harbour entrance, 2001 — depths unreliable.* It was the word 'unreliable' that caught her, finally, on a Tuesday evening when she was not looking for anything. He had mapped places he wasn't sure of. He had labelled his uncertainty and mapped it anyway. She started the forty-fourth map the following morning. It was of the town she had grown up in. She didn't know if she was doing it correctly. She put *depth uncertain* in the margins and kept going. It seemed like the right kind of faith to have.