What the Cartographer Left Out

The old map ends at the river's bend where someone drew a finch in blue ink, small and authoritative, as if to say this is where knowing stops.

My grandmother walked this valley before the reservoir swallowed it. She never pointed at water and called it water — only the name of the field it had been.

I have inherited her habit of grief held sideways, the way you look at the sun through your fingers, parsing its shape in the shadow of your hand.

Somewhere beneath the current, a doorframe still stands. The wood has gone soft as bread. The water moves through it the way wind moves through a word after you've said it too many times.

What the cartographer left out is this: every blank is a burial, every finch a small convenience placed where the truth wouldn't fit on the page.