What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps end at the marsh's edge, a clean ruled line where the surveyor lost his nerve or his boots or both, and everything past it is white.

We drove out there once, late summer, the car ticking in the heat, following a road the map insisted did not exist.

Cattails leaned over their own reflections. A heron held still as a word no one has spoken in years— the kind that dies with the last person who needed it.

You said the white parts of maps were not absence but invitation, the cartographer's way of saying go and see for yourself.

I kept the map. I folded it along the original creases, the way you fold a letter you're not sure you'll send— the marsh still white, still waiting.