The Cartographer's Last Draft

She drew the rivers first, the ones that no longer run the way she knew them — charcoal lines gone soft with second-guessing, every bend a sentence she could not finish.

The cities were harder. She gave them back their old names, the ones before the renaming, let the ink pool in the squares where markets stood and someone's grandmother still knew the price of salt.

At the borders she hesitated — those thin uncertain strokes, the places where one thing becomes another without asking permission.

In the margins she wrote notes to herself: here the light slants differently in October, here the word for home sounds like the word for bread. She folded it wrong, the way you always do with maps you mean to keep.

What survives a place? The shape of it, the weight of elevation, the way water finds the lowest argument. She rolled the paper carefully, tied it with the string she'd saved from something else, and left it where the next one would begin.