What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps named everything twice— once for the living, once for the dead. A river called Mercy on one side, on the other, simply: where she drowned.

We drove through the valley in August, the heat a white gauze over the fields. You read the signs aloud as if reciting something almost forgotten, a prayer from a language no one corrects anymore.

The town had moved without warning. The gas station, the grain elevator, even the church with its aluminum cross— all shifted north by half a century, leaving only the roads to remember the shape.

I kept the map. I kept the wrong distances, the faded legend, the compass rose aimed at a north that no longer answers. Some errors are more true than what replaced them.