The Cartographer's Last Shore

She drew the coastline from the inside out, her pen dragging across vellum the way a tide recedes— leaving what it touched already changed.

The harbor she charted no longer held its curve. A storm had swallowed three jetties whole, and the lighthouse now stood in a field of its own shadow, speaking to no ships.

She kept drawing anyway, the discrepancy mounting between the map and the mouth of the river that had wandered south while she slept.

Some cartographies are elegies. The land you mark is the land you mourn— that second skin laid down over the first.

At the edge of her paper the sea ran out of name. She wrote: *here is where the known world ends and something else begins,* and left the remaining white exactly as it was.