The Cartographer's Last Revision

She kept redrawing the coastline, erasing where the cliffs had crumbled into the patient mouth of the sea.

The old maps were still honest— they named the village before the flood, the road before the landslide sealed it. She left them stacked in the drawer like letters she couldn't bear to burn.

What is a border but agreement, two strangers shaking hands over ground neither of them made? She drew rivers as they were last spring, knowing they would move again by morning.

Some territories resist the pen— the place where grief settles in the chest, the country of a childhood kitchen, the latitude of a voice she hasn't heard in years.

She folded the unfinished map along its natural creases and placed it in the window, where the light could finish what her hands had started.