What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

The old man drew coastlines by hand, his pen dragging through the blue silence of hypothetical seas. Every island he named after something lost — a word for rain in a language no one spoke.

He left the interior blank. Not from ignorance, he said, but respect for what refuses to be known. The white center held its breath the way a held breath becomes its own country.

I found his atlas after the estate sale, the spine cracked, the pages foxed at the edges. Somewhere in the unnamed middle someone had pressed a feather — quill still carrying the shape of wind.

Now I trace the margins with my thumb, looking for the edge where his certainty dissolved, where the careful lines gave way to the merciful blankness that receives everything we cannot say.