The Cartographer's Last Island

She kept the island in a wooden drawer, folded twice along a crease that held the ghost of where her thumb had pressed again and again, locating herself.

The coastline she'd drawn in pencil first, then ink, then doubt — the inlet that curved like a question she couldn't finish asking, the cove where something had happened she never named on any map.

Contour lines rose in rings toward the hill she called the center, though she knew centers are chosen, not discovered. Every elevation was a year.

When she died the drawer stayed shut. Someone else opened it, found only paper, could not read the scale, held the island up to a window where the light came through and showed nothing — just the white of it, bright and exact and gone.