What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

The old maps gave names to every inlet, every ridge and shallowing ford — as if naming were a form of keeping, as if ink could hold a river still.

But here at the edge of the surveyed world the paper turns pale and uncommitted, and the land continues anyway, indifferent to its own omission.

My grandmother never wrote her name in any book I've found. She moved through villages the war erased, carried only what her hands could carry.

I spread the map across the kitchen table and trace the blank margin with one finger. Somewhere in that white, her mother's house. The well. The three plum trees. The road south.

The land is still there, I think. Renamed now, or not — it doesn't ask. It keeps its stones, its morning frost, whether anyone is watching.