They began as ordinary things, city grids, coastlines, the familiar geometry of places I knew. But month by month they changed. Rivers migrated west. Mountain ranges softened into plains. Last Tuesday, an entire sea appeared where my hometown should have been.
I've pinned them to the wall in sequence. Forty-one maps now. When I stand back and squint, they look less like geography and more like a slow erasure.
My neighbour Alice says I should call someone. Who? I ask. He doesn't answer. Three days later, I notice his city is gone from the newest map. Just water where it was. Flat and blue and indifferent.
I don't tell him.
The cartographer, I’ve decided there's only one isn't documenting the future. They're deciding it. Each map is a decree. A world mid-sentence, the pen still moving. I can see the logic in the erasures now: the cities that vanish are the ones where people stopped looking up. The coastlines that hold are the ones no one visits anymore. Some algorithm of neglect made visible.
This morning's map was nearly all ocean. One island, thumbnail-small. On it, in handwriting fine as a threat: a single structure. A tower. One window dark.
I found my street yesterday. Still there, for now a pale mark at the edge of a continent that's losing its argument with the sea. My building. My window. A dot so small I had to press the glass right up to the paper.
By the time I pulled back, I'd left a thumbprint over it.
I didn't try to wipe it clean.
I pinned the map and went to bed and slept, for the first time in months, without dreaming.
Based in Pune, India, Shashi Kadapa is the managing editor of ActiveMuse, a journal of literature. His stories across multiple genres are published in more than 45 US, UK, Canada anthologies. Winner of the IHRAF, NY short story prize, he is nominated thrice for the Pushcart Award.
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