The Cartographer's Last Map

She draws coastlines from memory now, the harbor where her father's boat came home smelling of diesel and cold. Each inlet is a sentence she can't finish.

The mountains are where certainty lived— those hard angles of childhood, the way stone held light at five o'clock and made promises it couldn't keep.

She names the rivers after arguments, the forests after silences between them. A legend in the corner explains nothing, only lists what has been lost.

When she folds the map, the roads touch places that were never roads, and the whole strange country creaks like a door left open in wind.

She will not make another. This one already knows too much, already bends toward the edges where the known world thins to white.