The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew coastlines from memory, the way a tongue returns to a gap where a tooth once was.

The mountains she rendered in pencil, not ink — knowing they shift, that even stone has its migrations, its slow refusals.

At the center of the map she left a white region, unmarked, the way you leave a chair at a table for someone who no longer needs to eat.

Rivers she named after things she meant to say: the River of Tuesday, the Fork of Almost, the estuary she labeled simply here.

When they found the map, they could not locate it in any atlas. They assumed she had invented the place. They were not entirely wrong.