What the Cartographer Left Out

The map names every river but not the sound a river makes when it passes under the last bridge before the sea.

She traced the coast with her thumbnail, pressing hard enough to leave a ghost-line, a second country superimposed on the printed one, the country she had actually walked.

Some borders are the backs of hands, the way a voice drops at the end of a question it already knows the answer to. These are not recorded.

The cartographer died in a city he had measured precisely and never understood. His instruments are in a museum now, accurate and cold.

What remains is the thumbnail's groove, the coast that curved against a living body— somewhere between the land as it is and the land as it was entered.