The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the world from the kitchen table, ink bleeding into the grain of wood, each river a vein she remembered from her grandmother's hands.

The continents drifted under her pen the way her father's voice had drifted into the static of a long-distance line, the way snow forgets the shape of what it covers.

North was a rumor here, a thread of cold pulled through paper. She marked the place she was born with a small black star, the way sailors marked harbors they did not expect to see again.

When the lamp guttered, the oceans turned the color of bruised plums, and she understood at last that no map ends at its edges— only the paper does.

She folded it into thirds, slid it beneath the bread, and went out into the unmeasured evening, the dog ahead of her, certain of the road.