The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coastline from memory, her hand trembling over the parchment the way a name trembles before you say it aloud.

Every inlet was a summer, every cape a conversation she could not finish. The rivers ran to seas that no longer existed.

She left the center blank— that territory she had entered once and could not map because mapping it would mean she'd left.

Somewhere offshore, an island appears only in the raking light of October. She gave it no name. She drew it anyway.