The Cartographer's Last Island

She drew the coastlines from what she remembered— the way the bay curved like a held breath, the lighthouse standing where certainty used to be.

Her pencil wore down to a sliver of intention. She kept pressing harder, as if the paper could be convinced to remember too.

The legend she made was modest: a square for shelter, a circle for water, a blank space where the village had been.

Years later someone found the map and tried to sail to it. They found only open water, the color of waiting.

The island exists now only in the paper's grain, in the pressure marks she left like the ghost of knowing where you are.