Mapping the Hollow

You wake to Meridian already halfway through its morning arguments: trams singing on wire, the distant clatter of a freight drone unloading cassette crates, a dog barking at a billboard that flickers like a broken eyelid. The apartment feels small: a single window facing the courtyard, an old drafting table with clipped corners and coffee stains, a stack of folded map skins wrapped in waxed paper. Your name is Luca Vale; twenty-three, hands stained with ink and motor oil, and your job is to remember what the city wants to forget.

Maps in Meridian are not just lines on paper. They are what people use to anchor their days—routes that slide along memory and law. You carry instruments older than the new grid: an analog compass with a brass needle, a palm-sized spectrometer that tastes light, a pocket camera that records not only sight but the quiet frequencies that settle in alleys. You call yourself a wayfinder because the word “cartographer” on a municipal form always causes clerks to frown. Wayfinding pays in odd jobs: redrawing fire-escape routes, patching illegal lanes after the planners erase them, rescuing addresses when someone's permit gets yanked overnight. It keeps you fed. It keeps your sister's café open.

Maya says you are sentimental. She says it in the doorway of her shop, flour on her cheekbone, hair pinned with a bent spoon. She hands you a paper bag with two cinnamon rolls and a flatboard of messages scrawled by early customers. “If you don't map the alley behind the bakery,” she says, “I swear the espresso machine will get lonely.” Her laugh is a small bell. Outside, the street is a quilt of voices. On market days, vendors peddle lemon-bright preserves and secondhand gears. Commuters pass like soft rain, each face lit by a personal window of augmented data: itineraries, recipes, duller, safer worlds.

You set your bicycle against the low wall and lay out a fresh skin on the drafting table. The city smells of warm metal and yeast. You unroll the map and trace, at first, familiar lines: the canal that cuts like a silver blade, the old library stacked with books that keep their own quiet, the stair that leads to the rooftop gardens. Your needle catches on a place you knew as a narrow square—the Hollow. It should be a small park: a bench, a poplar that leans like an old friend. Tonight, you think, you'll check the Hollow because you promised Maya you'd replace a missing address plaque. Your fingers worry at the edge of the paper as if the map itself might fray.