But that night, she dreams of a tape measure unspooling across a field, stretching toward a figure walking slowly away — and in the dream, the measure never runs out.
When Sophia is done, she has a notebook full of knots and numbers, a map of a body that has housed her for thirty-two years. She folds the string into a small box. She does not know yet if she will measure her mother again next year, or if this will be the last time.
She measures her mother’s height next — not the height she once was, before the spine softened and the shoulders curved forward, but the height she is now: five feet and a whisper. Then the span of her shoulders, the distance from her elbow to her fingertip, the circumference of her calf. Each number feels like a line of a poem she’s writing in a language only she will read.
