A young mapmaker once apprenticed under an old cartographer famous for a peculiar habit: every road he drew, no matter how it was reported to him by travelers, came out on the page with a faint curve, never perfectly straight.
"The travelers tell you the roads are straight," the apprentice said. "Why do you always bend them?"
"Because no one believes their own road is curving while they're walking it," the old man said. "It only looks straight from inside the walking. From above, where I sit with my pen, every road bends eventually. Most of them bend right back toward where they started, given enough length and enough years."
The apprentice didn't believe this until he left the cartographer's workshop himself, years later, and spent two decades moving from city to city, certain each move was a straight line carrying him further from where he began. He told himself he was leaving, not circling. He kept a small atlas with him through every move, packed at the bottom of every box, under every new bed, and never once opened it.
In his forty-third year, restless again, he found himself driving without any particular destination and arrived, after several hours, on a street he recognized with a jolt that had nothing to do with the rebuilt houses or the unfamiliar cars in the driveways. It was the street he'd grown up on. He hadn't been driving toward it. He would have sworn, an hour earlier, that he was driving away from everything that street represented.
He sat in the car for a long time, engine off, and finally understood what his old teacher had meant. Every city he'd lived in, every reason he'd given himself for leaving the last one, had been, without his noticing, a long unhurried curve, bending the whole time, patiently, back toward this exact spot.
He didn't need the old house to still be standing. He only needed to recognize, finally, the shape of the road that had brought him there. He opened the atlas in his glovebox for the first time in twenty years, and found, to no great surprise anymore, that every road he'd ever drawn in it curved.
More Stories
