The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew coastlines from memory, the way water remembers stone — not the shape, but the wearing.

Her pen found the harbor where her father once mended nets, salt crusting the rope like old arguments.

The legend had no symbol for grief, so she invented one: a circle left open at the south, like a mouth still waiting to say something.

When the map was finished she could not name the country. Only that she had been there once, and the light came in sideways, gold and insufficient.