The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the rivers from the inside out, tracing their cold grammars across vellum until the lines remembered what the water had forgotten.

A mountain is only a wound the earth refuses to close. She labeled them all the same: *here*.

Her ink was the color of old windows, the kind you look through without seeing what stands on the other side.

In the margins she wrote longitudes no compass could confirm— distances measured in the sound of a name after the person who carried it had gone somewhere unmappable.

When they found the map, they found no scale. Nothing to say how far one grief is from another, how many footsteps fit inside a silence, or where the legend ends and the land begins.