The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coast from memory, the harbor mouth crooked as she remembered it— a gap between two headlands where the light went thin in autumn.

She did not use a ruler. The lines wandered, corrected themselves, wandered again, the way water does when it has forgotten the shape of its bed.

Every name she wrote was someone else's leaving: Blackrock, Widows' Point, the inlet called Sorrow in three different languages by three different peoples who lost things there.

The sea, when she finished, was too large. It spilled off the paper's edge and kept going— she did not draw it smaller.

She folded the map along its wet creases and gave it to her granddaughter, who would unfold it in some future room and trace, with one uncertain finger, the coast of a country that no longer exists.