The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coastline from memory, the way her father's hands had moved— a tremor at the cape, then certainty, the pen pressing harder where the harbor bent.

The ink dried slowly in that winter light. She named the uninhabited islands after afternoons she could no longer enter, each one smaller than the one before.

What she could not map: the weight of tide-pull in the middle of a sentence, the way a room continues after you have left it for the last time.

She folded the paper once, along the mountains. A sound like something being taken back. Outside, the real sea kept going, indifferent, complete.