The Cartographer of Forgotten Rivers

She mapped the rivers that had dried before her birth, tracing ghost-blue lines across the parchment with a finger dipped in someone else's grief.

The names came to her without instruction— Arrowhead Wash, the Silted Narrows, each one a word the land had swallowed whole.

She knew the way a riverbed remembers water: the patience of smooth stone, the hollow dark beneath a bank where current carved its want.

At dusk she would press her ear to cracked earth and hear it—not the river, but the shape the river left behind, still calling out its course.

What we love becomes geography. What we lose becomes the map. She folded it carefully and walked into the dry.