The Cartographer's Last Shore

She drew coastlines from memory, her pen tracing the exact curve where the bay exhaled into open water — a breath held for thirty years, released onto rice paper.

The harbor she mapped no longer exists. A highway swallowed it whole, concrete drinking what the tide once touched. Still she renders each dock in ink the color of low tide.

There is a kind of faithfulness in the wrong map — the one that insists the ferry still runs, that the lighthouse keeper still climbs his spiral of salt-worn steps.

Her shelves hold forty years of places that have dissolved. She does not call it grief. She calls it surveying the interior of what was.