The Cartographer's Last Survey

She measures the coast with a string of gut, marks the indentations where the sea has argued with the cliff face, won, and moved on. The notebook smells of brine and turpentine. Every bay a parenthesis around nothing.

Her grandmother drew these same headlands thirty years before GPS, before satellites turned the earth into a thing that could be held. The old map hangs in the hallway: ink-brown distances, a coastline looser at the shoulders.

What the water took between the two surveys is just white space now, an absence more honest than the land it replaced. She writes: *erosion approx. 14m NW*. The sea does not need approx.

She rolls the map and tucks it in its tube, walks back to the car in wind that bends the marram grass sideways like a crowd watching something fall. The cliff does not know it is becoming ocean.