Where the maps forget

Nora had learned to grieve on purpose. It was the only way her hands would move. She sat at her desk with a blank sheet of paper and let herself think about her grandmother, the smell of her kitchen, the way she used to hum without knowing she was doing it. The grief came slow, then all at once, and when it did, her pen finally touched the page. Lines became streets. Streets became a town. A town her grandmother had grown up in and never spoke about, except through the recipes she left behind. This was the curse, if you could call it that. She could not draw a place unless she had truly grieved something tied to it. Happy memories gave her nothing. Only loss made the ink move. She was almost done with the map when she noticed the mistake. A shape near the edge of the paper that she had not drawn. A small mark, like a smudge, except it looked more like a building. She rubbed at it with her thumb. It did not fade. She kept working, telling herself it was nothing, until the shape grew clearer with every new street she added. By the time she finished the map, there was a man standing in the corner of it. Not drawn. Just there, the way a shadow is there, except he had a face, and the face was looking directly at her. Nora set down her pen. “You’re not supposed to be able to see me,” he said. She should have been afraid. Instead she felt something closer to embarrassment, like she had been caught doing something private. “I didn’t draw you,” she said. “No,” he agreed. “You drew my country.” She looked down at the map again. There was no country there she recognized. No name she remembered learning in school. Just streets that had come from nowhere and a man standing in the middle of them like he had been waiting a long time for someone to finally get the shape right. “It doesn’t exist,” she said, because that felt like the safest thing to say. “It did,” he said. “Once. Before everyone decided to forget it.” “Everyone but you.” “Everyone but you too, apparently.” Nora looked at the man in her drawing and felt the strange, cold pull of a memory that was not hers. Somewhere in her chest, something ached the way it did after grieving. Except she hadn’t grieved anything today. Not yet.