The Cartographer of Forgotten Rivers

She drew rivers that no longer ran, blue ink tracing the ghost of current across paper that remembered rain.

The delta she mapped with three fine hairs fanned open like a hand mid-reach— the estuary where salt once argued with fresh water.

Her tools: a compass that pointed inward, a ruler made of someone's held breath, light through a window that never faced east.

What she charted was not absence but the shape that water leaves behind— a country written in its own undoing, the negative of every flood.

She folded the finished map along old creases and pressed it between the pages of a book about birds, their hollow bones, how flight is just a way of belonging to air.