The Cartographer of Forgotten Rivers

She draws the rivers that no longer run— blue ink for what was blue, a trembling line where the oxbow bent and the herons came in autumn.

Her table holds six empty cups of tea, a magnifying glass she no longer needs, the paper softening under her wrist as she traces what her grandmother named.

Some channels she invents from thirst alone: the possibility of water in a crease of rock, in the logic of lowland and shadow and slope.

At dusk she folds the maps the way one folds a letter too honest to send, pressing each crease until the river lives entirely in her hands.