What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

She drew rivers by their sound— the long vowel of the lowland flood, the clipped consonant where water broke against stone and fell silent.

Some territories she left blank. Not from ignorance, but the way you leave space at the edge of a letter for the thing you cannot say outright.

The mountain range she named for an afternoon she remembered wrong— the light arriving from the wrong direction, a bird whose call she mistook for her name.

In the margins she drew the trees she had never seen, their roots descending below the paper into whatever lies beneath all maps.

When they found her work unfinished they assumed she had run out of time. They did not know that the blank places were the most careful thing she made.