The Cartographer's Insomnia

She spreads the old maps across the kitchen table at two in the morning, smoothing the creases as if she could press the wrinkles from a country that no longer exists.

The rivers are wrong. They always were — whoever drew these lines had never stood at the edge of moving water and watched it argue with the stone.

She adds new marks in pencil, tentative, the way you might leave a note for someone who might not return: a coastline shifted, a city renamed, the blank interior filled with guesses.

Outside, the neighborhood makes its small sounds — a car, a dog, the particular silence that follows a door closing somewhere. She draws that too. She draws everything she cannot keep from losing.

By morning the paper is soft with erasures. She rolls the map and sleeps, her hands still holding the shape of distances she has measured but never walked.