The Cartographer of Salt

She drew her maps in the kitchen at dusk, ink the color of slow tide, each coastline traced from the lip of an overturned cup.

Outside, the gulls turned their slow arithmetic above the chimneys. She named the headlands after the dead— not to mourn them, but to give them somewhere to stand.

The compass rose she kept blank. North, she said, is wherever the bread is still warm, wherever the door has not yet forgotten your hand.

When the lamp burned low she folded the parchment into thirds and slipped it beneath her pillow, hoping she would wake on one of its quieter islands.