The Cartographer of Salt

She drew the coastline twice — once with ink that bled into the paper's grain, once with the slow erosion of her thumb.

The lighthouse keeper sent her postcards of weather she had already lived through: gulls dismantling the sky, a fog that moved like an unfinished sentence.

In the margins, she pressed grains of beach between thin sheets of vellum, each one a small unwritten name. The map became heavier than the country it remembered.

Some nights, the sea unfolds her drafts across the kitchen table — salt rings where ports should be, a compass rose blooming through the wood.

She has stopped correcting the tides. She lets them carry her cartography out, returning each morning slightly altered, slightly more honest.