The Cartographer's Last Shore

She drew the coastline from memory, the way the tide once pulled back to reveal black stone beneath the foam, a world that disappeared each hour then returned, changed by the interval.

Her inks had dried to rust. The compass on her desk no longer pointed north but toward some private pole, a grief she'd learned to navigate.

Every map she made was wrong by morning — the river moved, the village took a different name, the mountain shed its snow like a letter no one claimed.

Still she drew. The hand knows what the eye forgets: the harbor's shallow throat, the reef that waited under green water, the shore that never looked the same twice and yet was always home.