What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

She drew the coast from what she could remember— the inlet where the herons stood like unlit candles, the sandbar that appeared at low tide, briefly, like a sentence someone almost finished.

The inland roads she traced by instinct, by the way a body recalls a path it walked in grief, the muscles in the feet knowing the dip before the mind does.

Some places she left blank on purpose. Not because she'd forgotten, but because a blank still holds the shape of what was there— the way a hand, unclenched, keeps the warmth of what it held.

The legend listed rivers, roads, elevations. It did not list the field where fog collected every morning like a crowd that had no reason to disperse. Some things resist the discipline of scale.

When she died they found the map half-finished, the eastern edge still pencil, still provisional— all those careful borders ending where her hand had stopped, in open water.