The Cartographer's Last River

She drew rivers by memory — the Orinoco wide as a held breath, the Lena splitting permafrost the way grief splits a season in two.

Her hands knew the weight of distance before the pen touched paper, could feel the bends and oxbows pooling behind her knuckles like standing water.

At the end she mapped a river no cartographer had named — a slow thing, dark-soiled, moving through country she had never visited except in the body's oldest atlas.

When they found the map they could not locate it on any globe. The scale said one inch equals one year. The legend was written in the margins and the margins had gone blank.