The Cartographer's Last Survey

She mapped the rivers before they changed their minds, traced each bend with a horsehair brush as though agreement were possible between water and paper.

By autumn the delta had moved three miles east. Her legend still named the old mouth, still placed the mangroves where only silt remained.

She kept the error. Folded the map the way you fold a letter you'll never send — carefully, along the original crease.

What survives a place is not the place. It's the hour you stood there, the particular light pressing its thumb into your chest.

She pinned the map above her bed and slept beneath the rivers as they were, dreaming the land into its older shape.