The Cupboard

I am a cartographer’s son.

I and my sisters—cartographer’s daughters, each—played often with Matchbox cars growing up, down in the unused room on our house’s basement level. The closet in the room had no door to it, and the carpet was thin and unpadded. It had the same pattern of stained tweed pants you bought for cheap one sad afternoon.

One day my dad came home from work and stepped down to the unused room and set on the ground a 3-D map of the moon. “Here,” he said, and we looked at it. It was made of molded plastic, like our Halloween masks, and spread over the ugly carpet an area about the size of four to six disposable cafeteria trays. Peaks and valleys pushed up and down as tall or as deep as Lego men. The whole thing an unsightly putty gray color you’d never pick to color with. Dotted lines and dashed ones; italic fonts spelling out the names of seas.

We drove our Matchbox cars all over it until it broke.