The Cartographer's Last Coast

She drew the coastline from memory, each inlet a hesitation, each headland a word she almost said.

The sea refused to hold still for her — it kept revising its own edges, eating sand the way a sentence eats its own beginning.

She named the unnamed rocks after things she couldn't keep: the patience of a fever, a door left open into rain.

At the peninsula's tip she placed a lighthouse that had never existed, its beam sweeping the dark like a question looking for its subject.

When they found the map years after she was gone, they thought the blank space at the center was where she ran out of ink. It wasn't.