The Cartographer's Last Survey

She drew the coastline from memory, the way her father's hands had moved— index finger tracing where the salt grass thinned to mud, then nothing.

The map does not know what has been taken. It holds only the shape of holding: inlets that still breathe the tide, a lighthouse she gave a name the charts refuse to keep.

At the table's edge, the pencil worn to its last grey inch. Outside, the fog has swallowed the peninsula again, the way grief swallows whole mornings— quietly, without apology.

She marks the blank space with a small X, the way cartographers once wrote Here be dragons when the world ran out of knowing. She understands them now.