What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

At the edge of every old map there is a silence where the surveyor's hand lifted from the page — not ignorance, but a kind of mercy, leaving the unnamed places unnamed.

My grandmother kept a drawer of keys that fit no door she could remember. She held them the way you hold a stone warmed once by someone else's sun, trusting the warmth, forgetting the stone.

I drove through the valley she described and found it ordinary: gas stations, a river that didn't know its name had changed. The mountains she'd made enormous in the telling were just mountains, patient and indifferent.

Still, I sat there in the car a long time. The light came through the windshield at an angle she might have recognized. The keys were in my pocket, cool and heavy, fitting nothing, belonging everywhere.