The Cartographer's Last Survey

She folds the peninsula back into the crease where it first began, her thumb tracing coastline the way a tongue finds a missing tooth.

The inland lakes have shifted north again. She notes this without alarm — water remembers nothing but the shape of what contains it.

By lamplight the contour lines breathe and resettle, elevation a kind of longing pressed flat between two planes of glass.

She has surveyed every border twice and still the villages refuse to stay where she placed them, migrating toward the margin like words at the edge of sleep.

In the end she leaves one corner blank — a mercy, she thinks, for whatever has not yet agreed to be found.