The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coastlines from memory, each inlet a sentence she once knew by heart, the estuary a mouth that had forgotten its own name.

The peninsula was where he used to stand, pointing toward islands that dissolved in haze— she rendered them faithfully, wrong.

Mountains rose where flatlands had been. The river bent against itself. She pressed harder with the pen, as if pressure could make the land obey what she remembered.

When she finished, she held it to the window. Light came through the paper like a bruise. She thought: this is how it works— you chart the place you loved and discover you were mapping yourself all along.