Glyphwork

Asha Park kept a list of small repairs to make, but the list was a private thing she kept in the margins of her hands. She was a restorer of marks, a person who climbed and smoothed and coaxed tired lines back into motion. To most people the city wore signs. To Asha the signs breathed; each contour was a vocabulary note. When a curve faltered, she could feel it in her fingertips the way another person felt a pulse. Her father had taught her to listen. He left tools, a smell of resin, and a single brass badge she wore like an old promise.

The work was tidy—paint, braided copper, a compound that made a carved line glow. She liked the ritual in the morning and the quiet. It paid in coin and in nods from shopkeepers. It kept her close to the living grammar beneath the city's skin. Those marks kept doorways from overflowing with drifting things and kept the careless rumble of weather from untying other people's memories.

Recently smooth brandwork has begun over the older faces. A company put flat panels over carved advertisements and projected diagrams onto awnings to make everything look neat and readable. The new layers matched shapes. They did not match breath. A perfect outline could be a dead thing. Asha found the difference with her tools: an overlay stuck like plastic over a wound, the original line flattening where its life had been moved elsewhere.

On the east market she smoothed a flaking bakery sigil when the hum beneath her hand stuttered. A maintenance crew had gone up the block to scrape and cover a vintage mural. A boy kicked a can and pigeons scattered. Asha tightened a stitch and felt the small cold of absence. She thought she could patch it. She did not know yet how quickly absence grew.

She paused to remember the day her father vanished into a ward collapse years ago; the badge was all that returned. It was the reason she kept fixing things: to prevent another quiet undoing. She felt both stubborn and afraid.