The Cartographer's Last Sea

She drew the coastlines from feel alone, fingertips tracing where the land forgot itself into salt and erasure.

Every map she made was smaller than the one before— the harbor shrinking to a cove, the cove to a blue suggestion, the suggestion to a name no one remembered how to pronounce.

Her ink smelled of low tide. She kept a window open to the east and called the draft a collaborator, the way it lifted the corners of everything she wasn't sure of.

At the end she drew only interiors: a room with light on one wall, a staircase going somewhere certain, the known dimensions of a cup.

The sea she left blank— which is not the same as empty, which is not the same as done.