What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

At the edge of the old maps the ink grows thin, uncertain — dragons placed not from fear but from the honest admission that no one had returned.

My grandmother's hands moved the same way over photographs, pausing at the blurred margins, the half-faces cut by someone's thumb, the places where the story thinned.

She never named them. Not from grief, I think, but because naming pins a thing to its disappearance.

Now I trace coastlines no explorer charted — the exact latitude of a voice I still hear some mornings, the longitude of a Sunday kitchen.

Here be the unnamed. Here be the places that did not need a dragon to explain why no one ever fully came back.