The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew coastlines from memory, each inlet a hesitation, each cape a sentence she never finished.

The sea kept revising itself while she pressed ink into paper — the harbor she knew already filling with someone else's names.

What is a map but an argument with the world as it refuses to stay? She mapped her mother's hands, the archipelago of knuckles, islands without shores.

In the end she left the center blank, a white country labeled only *here*, the place the pen had come to rest before the paper gave way to nothing.

Her students find the maps now and call them incomplete. They do not know that blank is also a kind of landmark.