The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the rivers backward, tracing where water has been rather than where it goes — charcoal smearing the page into the shape of departure.

The mountains were easier before she knew them. Now each peak holds a name that keeps dissolving when she reaches for it, the way fog refuses to be held even in cold hands.

She maps the borders of what remains: a yellow kitchen, a sound like wool, the weight of someone else's coat. The blank spaces are not empty — they are full of what she cannot bear to mark.

At the edge of the page she writes *here the known world ends*, though she suspects it ended earlier, somewhere in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday she failed to notice was the last.