What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps marked the marshes as impassable, drew thin hatching where the reeds stood thick, named nothing there but hesitation. My grandmother walked them anyway, her boots filling slowly, like cups.

She said the water held a temperature memory never reaches— warmer than you expect, then cold, the way a name surfaces and then does not.

I have the map she gave me. The marshes are blank. I trace the edge with a finger and feel the paper resist, a held breath, a border kept.

Somewhere in that white space a heron lifts without a sound. The ink cannot say where it lands.