The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew coastlines from what she remembered of her father's voice, the way certain words curved like a bay before the silence came.

The paper held the shapes of things gone missing— a street that flooded, a door she used to open without thinking, without the weight of knowing it would be the last time.

Scale was a problem. One inch could mean everything important, or nothing at all. She used her thumbnail as the key.

By evening the legend had grown crowded: dark triangles for grief, blue hatching for the hours she had searched the wrong rooms, a single red dot where she stood now, uncertain whether this was the known world or its edge.

She folded it wrong on purpose, the crease cutting straight through the center, so any hand that opened it would have to decide which half to trust.