The Cartographer's Last Island

She drew coastlines from what she could not yet see, the pencil moving ahead of the lantern, faith shaping the curve of bays that might dissolve by morning.

Every island she mapped was already leaving— sandbars that breathed with the tide, cliffs that turned their faces to the wind and forgot what year they belonged to.

What she was really charting was time: the way a harbor fills with its own shadow at dusk, the way the word *home* moves like a buoy cut loose, riding somewhere south.

Her final page was empty except for depth soundings and a single notation in the margin— *here the water knows something the shore does not.*

She left it unfinished. All true maps are.