The stall stood at the far end of the flea market, between a table of chipped teacups and a man selling broken clocks, and Iris would have walked straight past it if not for the cardboard sign. In beautiful, old-fashioned handwriting, it announced: MAPS OF PLACES YOU HAVE LOST.
The seller was a small, elderly woman with silver glasses, surrounded by rolled sheets of paper arranged in wooden boxes. Some of the rolls looked ancient and fragile, while others seemed fresh, the ink barely dry.
'Lost places,' Iris said, amused despite herself. 'Like Atlantis?'
'Atlantis is in the third box,' the woman replied without smiling, 'but that one is not yours — give me your hand.'
It was obviously a silly street performance, and yet Iris held out her hand anyway. The woman studied her palm the way a librarian studies a call number, then pulled a slim roll from the bottom of the nearest box. 'Fourteen Rosemont Avenue,' she said quietly. 'Second floor. The kitchen with the yellow curtains.'
Iris felt the ground tilt slightly beneath her, because her grandmother's apartment building had been demolished twelve years ago, and a parking garage occupied the address now. She had not spoken those words aloud in years.
'How—'
'Five dollars,' said the woman.
At home, Iris unrolled the map across her table and discovered that it was not a street map at all, but the apartment itself, drawn from above in fine brown ink: the hallway with the crooked mirror, the overloaded bookshelf, the kitchen table beneath the yellow curtains. Tiny, elegant labels marked things that no official record would ever contain. Here: the drawer where the playing cards lived. Here: the chair where Grandma read to you. Here: the window where you watched for your mother's car, and where Grandma watched beside you, pretending not to worry.
And in the corner of the kitchen, in letters so small that Iris needed her phone light to read them: She was never disappointed in you. She only worried that you would forget how to rest.
Iris sat completely still for a long time, and then she did something she had been postponing for three years, through every promotion and every missed holiday: she opened her laptop, wrote a short message to her manager, and booked two quiet weeks by the sea.
The following Saturday she returned to the market with a list of questions. The teacups were there, and so were the broken clocks, but between them stretched an empty space, and the clock seller could not remember any stall, or any woman, ever standing there at all.