short fiction · 2026-10-30

Topography and Grace

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The motor cortex maps the finger to its key, the wrist to its arc — a topography precise as a scribe's rule, each neuron a named province.

The cerebellum knows no such borders. It sings in populations, a chorus where timing is not address but rhythm, where the stag's leap and the quill's stroke share the same score.

Montaigne copied the Latin verse on the Graces: Si quid enim placet... If anything please that I write, if it infuse delight into men's minds, all is due to the charming Graces.

He wrote it with a mapped hand. The stag never learned the verse. Both moved through the same morning light.