What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps named the marshes after things that no longer lived there — Heron Flats, Wolf Crossing — as if names could hold what water and winter could not.

My grandmother kept a road atlas with pencil lines through places she had meant to go, the margins soft with erasure, geography of almost.

I have driven those roads myself now, past the turnoffs she had marked, and found them ordinary — a grain elevator, a gas station, the light doing nothing unusual.

But I stop anyway. I get out and stand in the ditch where the wind comes from somewhere flat and far, and I listen the way you listen at a door.

The atlas is still in a box somewhere. I have not opened it. Some maps are not for finding places — they are for keeping the distance exact.