The Cartographer's Last Survey

She draws the coast from memory now, the shoreline her hand knew before the storm rewrote it in a single afternoon— bluffs collapsed to rubble, the harbor mouth widened like a question.

What she renders on the paper is not a lie, she tells herself, only a record of what the land intended to remain. The pencil moves along grooves worn into her palm.

Three decades she has mapped this coast, noting where the kelp forests thin, where the current bends around the point in late September, the water turning its particular shade of pewter.

The new survey will correct her. Satellites will draw the truth of it— precise, indifferent, without the tremor of a hand that knows which rocks the seals preferred.

She folds the page and sets it down. Outside, the fog is doing what fog does: erasing edges, softening the claim of one thing over another, returning the world to draft.