The Cartographer's Last Survey

She drew the river twice— once as it ran in March, swollen with snowmelt, once as it would run in August, a thread of itself. Both versions true. Neither complete.

The village had moved three miles east since her grandmother's survey, the houses following the well the way any people follow water. She erased nothing. She drew a palimpsest.

At the edge of the known sheet she wrote: *here the forest remembers fire*, and left blank the acreage still deciding what it would become— scrub, or oak, or field, or something without a name yet.

She rolled the map at dusk and walked home through the territory it described, her boots reading the ground the way a hand reads braille— not to translate, but to confirm that something is there.