The Cartographer's Last Room

She mapped the coastlines of her childhood summers— each inlet where the herons stood like patients, the sandbars that appeared and vanished with the tides' slow argument.

The paper curled at corners, yellowed as old teeth. She'd traced the same peninsula so many times the pencil had worn a groove.

By the end she could no longer name the river that divided her mother's house from the field, but she could feel its width in her hands, the cold of it, the pull.

We found her room filled with maps of places none of us recognized— continents of interior weather, oceans without shores.

The legend read: *here is where I stood. Here is what I could not lose.* Outside, a sparrow landed on the sill and stayed a long time, looking in.