What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

At the edge of the map she drew a mountain with no name, only a small trembling line that meant: I was here and the cold was real.

The valley below it held a river her instruments couldn't measure — it ran toward something she never reached, a blue hypothesis, a guess at sea.

She folded the paper where the roads ran out. The crease became a border. Everything west of it: a country of inference, populated by the sounds she heard at dusk.

Years later someone found the map in a drawer. They named the mountain after her, which is not what she wanted. She wanted the mountain to stay a little frightened of itself.

What we call completion is only the last person who stopped looking. The river runs. The blank edge holds its silence like a closed hand.