What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps named everything twice— once for the living, once for what they feared. Here be the shoals. Here be the place where the current changes its mind.

My grandmother kept a map of the village she left at seventeen, the streets drawn in pencil so faint you had to hold it to the window to see where she'd been born.

She added nothing to it over sixty years. Not the road they paved through the orchard. Not the well that collapsed, or the names of the children who learned to be afraid there.

A map is an argument, she said, about what deserves to last. The rest—the light at that particular hour, the smell of rain on limestone— you carry until you can't.

Now she is gone and the map remains, its blank margins full of what she remembered and couldn't bring herself to write down, white space holding the shape of a country that only ever existed once.