The Cartographer of Sleep

She maps the borders of her own forgetting— a coastline that recedes each time she names it, a province where the lamps burn green and the rivers run in two directions at once.

Here, the dead arrive carrying the wrong umbrellas. A horse the size of a thimble waits beneath the table. Her childhood kitchen has grown a balcony that looks out over an ocean she has never visited but which already knows her by another name.

The cartographer keeps no compass. Each pencil mark dissolves before the next one lands. She drafts whole cities out of the smell of rain, then watches their citizens drift toward the windows as though listening for a voice she has not yet spoken.

By morning, only the legend remains: a small key in the corner of the page, untranslated, the symbols still warm from her thumb— proof of a country she once governed and will return to, ungoverned, tonight.