What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

There are rivers on old maps that end in nothing — no delta, no sea, just the ink thinning to silence where the explorer turned back.

My grandmother's hands moved like water over the table, tracing routes between salt shaker and cup, narrating a city that no longer stands.

The street she named every morning was renamed in 1963. The building she pointed toward is a parking structure now, its shadow falling east instead of north.

I keep her maps anyway — the ones drawn in air, in habit, in the way she still said go left at the sycamore that burned down before I was born.

What we inherit is not the place but the gesture toward it: the lifted chin, the extended arm, the certainty of someone who knew exactly where they were.