What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

In the drawer beneath the window she kept a map folded so many times the creases had become their own country, a pale grid of forgetting where the mountains used to be.

She traced the river with one finger the way you trace a scar— not to remember the wound but to remember you survived it, that the skin closed over and held.

Some towns appear only in drought. The lake retreats and there is the old ferry dock, the sunken church that still keeps its bell, still marking the hour for no one who is listening.

What we name, we lose a little. The hill becomes a hill becomes a hill until the word goes smooth and empty, until the hill itself seems foreign, a stranger wearing your childhood's face.

She refolded the map along none of the old lines. It made a new shape in her hands— something without a legend, something the eye had to learn the way the ear learns a language by sleeping near it.