A Cartographer's Dilemma

by: Rachel Parker

| Published in Penstriken Spring 2025 Edition, "Lines". |

In my grandfather’s study on Sunday afternoons, the map hung beside his leather chair, its edges brown and curling like autumn leaves. Dust gathered in the creases where India met Pakistan. He’d spread his hands across the old British Empire–all that pink expanse seeming impossibly vast to me at seven. The age spots scattered across his skin like tea stains on paper as his fingers traced the borders, those clean black lines splitting tribes and families as neat as the way he parted his hair each morning with his bone-handled comb. Once he told me about a Bedouin boy who’d walked his camel herd across five countries without knowing it. He chuckled, but his eyes stayed serious behind his wire-rim glasses, and he smoothed the map with palms that had never touched those distant sands.

My father’s atlas lived in the drawer below the phone, wedged between take-out menus and unpaid bills, its pages soft as old dollar bills. The winter the Wall came down, he started spending nights at the kitchen table, shoulders hunched under the weak light above the sink. He’d try out the new names under his breath–Croatia, Serbia, Ukraine–while his pencil moved and erased, moved and erased, until the paper wore thin. Sometimes he’d pause with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth, staring at borders that shifted like shadows. “Nothing makes sense anymore,” he’d say, though I wasn't sure he was talking to me.

Now my daughter sits beside me at the desk her great-grandfather built, her small finger following the edge of my blank paper. The morning news whispers from the kitchen about walls going up, borders closing. Through the window, I watch a cardinal hop along our fence, one wing in our yard, one in Mrs. Abernathy’s, until it lifts into air that knows no boundaries. I pick up my pencil, its worn wood smooth against my palm. My daughter watches as I draw, and I think of my grandfather’s certainty, my father’s doubt, and how she still sees only spaces to cross.