The Cartographer's Last Survey

She measured the coast by walking it barefoot, counting each rock as a syllable in a language the sea was still inventing.

Her notebooks thickened with tidal marks, the particular slant of dunes at noon, where the tern colonies returned each May to nest in the same arrested silence.

Some borders she drew in pencil — provisional, subject to the argument of storms. Others she pressed so hard the page remembered the shape of what she feared would vanish.

Now the notebooks live in a climate-controlled room where no one touches the foxed pages. The coast she mapped keeps moving anyway, indifferent to the precision of her grief.