The Cartographer's Last Survey

She mapped the coastline from memory, each inlet a name she'd given as a child — the one where the herons stood like rusted hinges, the one that tasted of copper after rain.

The instruments had grown unreliable. North pulled toward something warmer now, and the distances between things no longer held their old agreements.

She drew the mountain anyway, though she knew it had moved slightly westward, the way grief moves — not vanishing but occupying a different part of the sky.

In the margins she wrote the things the legend couldn't hold: how the valley fog smelled of woodsmoke and argument, how silence had its own topography.

When they found her charts they said she'd made errors, confused the actual with the remembered. But she had mapped the only country she knew how to find.