The Cartographer of Unmade Roads

She draws the rivers that ran dry before her birth, tracing their ghost-channels with a fingernail across the paper's grain, patient as a geologist reading extinction in the layered stone.

The legend holds symbols for what cannot be seen— the field where a house stood until the war, the hill reshaped by a quarry's hunger, absence marked in the same ink as presence.

Outside, the actual road bends around a tree that was felled last winter. The map will not know this for years. Between the real and the drawn, weather gathers.

She inks a dotted line where the old path went, how her grandmother walked it before the fence, before the word trespass entered the common mouth like a stone.

Every map is a letter to the future, written by someone who cannot imagine what the future will have lost— the careful hand, the annotated margins, the faith that the land will wait to be named.