What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

The old maps end at the edge of their own knowing— a coastline frayed into conjecture, the sea beyond filled with whatever the hand feared to draw.

She kept one folded in her coat. Not for the roads it named but for the blank space at its center, the village that had been unworthy of ink.

That is where she grew up. She recognized it by the river that bent just so, unnamed, running off the paper's edge into the actual world.

Now she traces the white silence with one finger the way you might touch a scar after the wound has finally stopped explaining itself, after the body has learned to call it skin.

There are places that exist only in the body. The cartographer knew this too— why else would he press so hard with the nib at the border of the known, leaving a ghost of ink on everything beneath?