The Cartographer's Last Map

She mapped rivers that no longer ran, drew contour lines around hills she had walked as a girl, before the quarry swallowed them whole.

The pen moved from memory— each inlet a held breath, each borderline the edge of something she would not say aloud.

At night the blank spaces filled themselves: forests returning in blue ink, the old road to her mother's house threading through unmarked terrain.

What is a map but a grief made navigable, the world pressed flat so the hand can trace what the foot cannot.

She rolled the last sheet and set it with the others, all those careful renderings of places only she could find.