The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coastline from memory, the bay where the water turned green before storms, the inlet she couldn't name but could taste— salt and iron, the smell of low tide in August.

Her pencil found the road that bent at the old schoolhouse, which was already a ruin when she was a child, already a ruin in her grandmother's stories. Some things exist only as their own disappearing.

The mountains she left unfinished. Not because she'd forgotten their shape but because a ridge line carries everything you carried when you first crossed it, and she wasn't ready to put that weight down on paper.

In the margin she wrote: here the light changes. No coordinates. No legend. Only the fact of it, which is enough— the particular gold of late afternoon falling through a gap she can't go back to.

She folded the map along lines she hadn't drawn. It held the crease like a scar, like skin. She put it somewhere safe, which means she will never find it again.