Cartography of Salt

The map my grandmother kept was wrong by design— roads that curved toward towns she'd left, rivers marked where no water ran anymore. She said all good maps lie a little to make you keep moving.

I found it after, folded in quarters, pencil notations in the margins that I mistook for coastlines. What I thought was ocean was a word she wrote, then pressed out flat.

There is a cartography of salt— the white residue on windows facing sea, the crust inside old letters, the mineral taste of waking in a house that no longer holds her voice.

Every map is an argument about what deserves to last. She drew the missing roads anyway. She named the dry rivers. She made the margins large enough to write in.