The Cartographer's Last Window

The old mapmaker folds his coastal charts and watches fog swallow the harbor whole, each lighthouse swallowed last, its eye gone white before the water takes the name of every cove.

He drew the world in ink that smelled of iron, pressed longitude into paper thin as moth wings. The meridians held. The rivers didn't. A delta shifts and erases its own name.

There is a country he mapped thirty years ago that no longer exists under that word, its capital renamed, its borders redrawn by men who never saw the mountains.

The mountains remain. He knows this. He has not been back to verify. He keeps the old map pinned above his desk like a letter he cannot bring himself to open.

Outside, the fog is lifting from the harbor. Ships emerge as facts do from the past— slowly, dripping, altered by the crossing, certain of nothing except that they have arrived.