What the Cartographer Forgot

She drew the coastlines first, the way her mother taught her — push the nib until the ink blooms outward like a bruise finding its edges.

Every island had a name she gave it. Some were sounds she'd heard once in sleep, others were borrowed from the mouths of strangers who never looked up from the water.

The map grew crowded with her certainties: here the shelf drops, here the current turns, here a reef that only shows itself when the tide forgets to hide it.

But she could not find the place she'd left herself — the particular bend of river where she'd sat watching herons fold into stillness, her own name dissolving in the afternoon.

In the white margin at the edge of the known world she drew a small house, unlabeled, smoke rising from its chimney in a hand that was not quite hers.