The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew coastlines from memory, the way a tongue finds the gap where a tooth once was — that faithful, useless muscle.

Her table held seventeen versions of the same peninsula, each one a different year, each shoreline more invented than the last.

The sea does not hold still for anyone. She knew this. She kept drawing anyway, the way you keep saying a name after the person has left the room.

In the final map she left the center blank — a white country, no contour lines, no legend, no scale. Just a margin note in her smallest hand: here is where I stopped knowing.

The ink dried at different rates, the newer coasts still faintly wet, the old ones foxed and lifting at the edges, patient as all things that have given up on being found.