The Cartographer's Last Map

She mapped the rivers first, their slow meander through the delta, how they thinned to nothing at the edge of known things— a blue thread pulled from cloth until it frays.

The mountains took more care. She pressed so hard the pencil grooved the paper, left a ghost of altitude on every page beneath. Some peaks she named for people still alive.

By the time she reached the coast she could not remember the interior, the forest she had walked through as a girl, the exact green of it, the way sound fell.

She drew it anyway—a green expanse, unnamed, approximate, the legend reading *here the trees remember what I've lost*— and set the map face-down before the window.

Outside, the actual world continued: sparrows in the linden, a dog's bark floating up from somewhere in the valley, the light doing what light does in March.