The Cartographer's Last Season

She folded the coastline the way her mother folded letters— pressing a thumb along the crease until the paper remembered.

Some rivers she had drawn twice: once as they were, once as they would be after the drought had its say. The second maps she burned.

The mountains did not ask to be named. They rose and said nothing, let her chalk their blue flanks with whatever she needed.

In the final notebook she wrote: all distances are measured from where you are standing. The horizon keeps its distance the same as fear.

Now the drawers hold only unlabeled water— shorelines she could not bring herself to finish, the edge of things, open.