What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

The old cartographer kept a drawer of unfinished coastlines, edges that dissolved into white paper like coastlines that had simply stopped believing in themselves.

He said every map is a theory of what persists. The mountains he drew stayed mountains for a hundred years. The rivers were less certain.

Once he mapped a city from memory alone, streets spooling from his wrist in a familiar grammar— but he placed the baker's shop where the river now ran, and no one told him, because the bread had been good there.

What we name survives differently than what we don't. His unnamed bays remained open, genuinely open, available to whatever tide arrived next.

After he died they found a final chart: just a circle, and inside it the word here, as if location were the last thing left to argue with.