The Cartographer's Last Map

She kept the maps she could not finish— coastlines that dissolved before the pencil reached the shore, rivers that widened into something nameless and stopped.

The island she was born on had drifted so many times in memory she drew it differently each year, the harbor mouth a little wider, the hill above it steeper than it was.

What we remember is a country that never held still long enough to chart. We fold and refold the paper until the crease becomes the border we were looking for.

At the end she labeled the blank spaces not Here Be Dragons, but simply I was here, and the water moved, and I could not keep up.