The Cartographer's Last Map

She draws the coastline from memory now, the inlet where her father's boat went quiet, where herons stood like punctuation in the sentence the water kept starting over.

The pencil knows what the hand forgets— how distance shrinks a mountain to a hatch mark, how a road becomes a rumor of itself, a dotted line across the white.

She leaves one corner of the page unmarked. Not from forgetting, but from knowing some territories refuse to be contained by the tools of someone else's science.

At night the map breathes in the drawer, the rivers finding new channels, borders softening like old arguments no one can quite remember starting.