The Cartographer of Forgotten Rivers

She draws rivers that no longer run— blue ink settling into tributaries that dried before she was born, names like cupped hands holding air.

The paper remembers better than the earth. A valley folds into itself where the oxbow curved west, and the towns along the bank are footnotes to a silence.

She traces her finger along the absence, that white space where water was, the way you might press a scar to remind the skin what it once had to hold.

At dusk she rolls the map and ties it, carries it home like a sleeping child. Outside, the field is dry and exact. Stars appear in the order the darkness has always kept.