The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coastlines from memory— the harbor where her father's boat came back empty, riding low on grief rather than fish.

The mountains she invented slightly taller than they were, the way one does with things that once felt large enough to shelter everything beneath them.

Her rivers ran true, though. Water has no patience for nostalgia, cuts where it must, abandons its own tributaries without apology.

At the edge of the map she wrote *here the known world ends* in a hand so careful it looked like someone else's.

She folded it once, twice, the old creases finding themselves like a body returning to sleep— and set it in the drawer among the others, all of them charts of the same vanished country.