The Cartographer's Last Shore

She kept a drawer of coastlines she had never seen, tracings lifted from other people's hands— the bite of an estuary, the long exhale of a cape, each one borrowed, each one worn smooth as a river stone.

The sea she mapped was always somewhere else. A grid of blue intention laid over water that refused to hold still, the legend explaining nothing the body already knew.

By evening her ink became the color of low tide, and she would trace her own wrist the way she traced a delta— following the branch that forked toward the quieter dark.

What remains of a place when the name is lifted off? A silhouette of salt. The ghost of a depth sounding. Whatever the map refused to admit.