What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps showed mountains as teeth, as though the earth were biting at something just above the clouds. No one asked what it was biting toward.

My grandmother folded her roads into smaller and smaller squares until the creases became the territory— a country of white lines where the highways had been.

There are rivers that appear only in rain, that vanish by noon into the cracked field as if they had imagined themselves. I have stood at the edge of such rivers and understood the logic.

What is left out is not absence. It is the agreement between the mapmaker and the world that some things hold still only when no one names them.