You are eleven, and you are grounded for a week, which is how the map begins.
Your mother says you may go out to the corner and no further, and you decide, in the specific fury of eleven, that if the world is going to be one street long then you will know that street better than anyone alive.
Day one you count the paving slabs from your gate to the corner. Ninety-four. You count them again coming back and get ninety-six, and you learn something about measurement that no lesson has taught you: you must decide in advance where a thing starts.
Day two you draw the street on the back of a homework sheet, and it is wrong. The bakery is too close to the mosque and the road bends the wrong way. You go out and look, and come back and draw it again, and it is wrong differently.
Day three you notice the cat.
She lives behind the generator housing at number 12 and she is out at exactly the same time each afternoon, when the shadow of the water tank reaches the drain cover. You mark the drain cover on the map with a small square. It is your first symbol, and inventing it feels enormous.
Day four you notice that the bakery smells different in the morning than the evening, and you have no way to draw a smell, so you write words on the map instead, small, along the wall: bread — early. sugar — late. Now the map has a legend.
Day five your neighbour Abu Yusuf, who is ninety and has lived here since the road was sand, asks what you are doing. You show him. He looks at it for a long time.
"The tree is missing," he says.
"There is no tree."
"There was a tree here," he says, and he points at the empty triangle beside the electricity box. "They took it out when they put the pipes in. Nineteen ninety-something."
You draw the tree. You draw it in dotted lines, because you have decided that dotted lines mean not there any more, and inventing that feels even bigger than the drain cover.
Day six he brings a photograph.
Day seven your mother says you may go out again, anywhere you like, and you say all right, and then you spend the afternoon on the corner adding the bus stop that was moved in April and the shop sign that says PHARMACY in letters that are wrong on purpose so you copy them wrong on purpose too.
Your map is now four sheets taped together. It shows ninety-four paving slabs, one cat with a schedule, a smell with two times of day, a tree that stopped existing before you were born, and a spelling mistake that somebody paid for.
You will move away when you are nineteen. You will keep the map.
Not because the street was interesting. Because for seven days you were.