The Cartographer's Last Revision

She spent forty years drawing coastlines that kept changing in the night — each morning the tide had erased some peninsula she'd named after her mother.

The legend grew longer than the map itself: symbols for what had been, notations in the margins where the land dissolved into supposition.

Her colleagues brought her satellites, clean data streaming from orbit — she thanked them, rolled the printouts into kindling, lit the stove with certainty.

What she trusted was the smear of graphite where her palm had rested too long, the small betrayals of the compass needle pointing somewhere close to north.

At the end she left the center blank. Not for mystery — for honesty. Some territories refuse to be fixed. We only prove we were here by the edges we touched.