The Map Objects

The line will not hold. She draws the street and the street, politely and completely, declines to be there in the morning. This is not new. Orrin rearranges itself the way other cities settle in their sleep, and a cartographer of Orrin learns to map not where things are but where things agree to be. What is new is the smudge near the eighth door. She did not draw it. It has the particular grey of a thumbprint, and her thumbs, she checks, are clean.