Every map in the little shop had the same empty corner. Roads ran toward it, then stopped. The river continued underneath the blank space and appeared again on the other side.
“Is that where you have not been?” the visitor asked.
The cartographer set down her pencil. “It is where I used to write too quickly.”
He looked at the neat labels across the rest of the page. Market. Orchard. Old bridge. Each seemed to promise a complete understanding of something.
“What was there?”
“A field, the first time. A building, the second. Someone's garden after that. I kept giving it a name that belonged to the previous visit.”
The visitor thought of the street he had grown up on. In his memory, the gate was still blue. It had been red for years.
“So you leave it empty.”
“Until I have a reason to fill it. A blank space can be more accurate than an old certainty.”
He bought a map and asked for a pencil. On the back he wrote a question instead of his name: What has changed since I last looked?
Outside, he turned down a road he knew well. At the first corner he noticed a tree growing through a fence. He could not remember whether it had always been there.
For once, he was content not to decide.