The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the rivers first, the way her mother taught her — thin blue threads that know where they are going even in the dark.

The mountains came later, shaded with the side of her thumb, leaving a gray smear she could not rub away.

She mapped the town where he died: the bakery still warm at five a.m., the bench beneath the linden tree, its shadow a sundial no one reads.

Now her hands shake over the paper. The coastlines drift. Whole continents forget their names and slip beneath the margin.

She folds the map along its oldest crease. Somewhere inside its folds a river is still running toward a sea she has not named.