The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coastlines from memory, the way her father's hands had moved across the table— deliberate, then suddenly unsure, a peninsula reaching into blue that no longer existed.

The ink still smells of iron and pine. She keeps the oldest maps face-down because the territories they name have been renamed, or swallowed, or were never real to begin with.

What is a border but a line someone convinced the ground to believe? Her pencil pauses at the river's bend where she once waded to her knees and found the current knew nothing of nations.

On the last page, she leaves it blank— not emptiness, but the kind of white that means: here is where the knowing ends, here is where you must set down the tools of your certainty and walk.