The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coastlines from memory, each inlet a curve she had traced with the heel of her hand against the cold glass of winter windows.

The villages had their own weather. She wrote their names in a script so small the letters became topography, ridges you could almost feel if you pressed your thumb flat.

What she could not map was the leaving— the way a road stops not at a border but at the body that once walked it, and does not return.

She folded the whole country into a square small enough to palm, pressed it once to her sternum like a compress, and did not unfold it again.