The Cartographers

Short story by May N.

They woke him just before the sun began to rot.

He had not remembered signing up for anything, but the men in reflective uniforms spoke as if he had. “You've been selected,” they said, “for the work.” They handed him a map that was blank. Only a single instruction was written at the top: Walk until the land remembers.

They gave him boots and a notebook. Then they vanished.

He began walking.

Each town he passed was quieter than the last. Sometimes he found plastic stacked like bones. Sometimes he saw whole forests made of rust. Often, there was nothing. Just wind shaped like grief.

When he tried to write, his pen refused to touch the paper. It was not yet time, he thought.

Eventually, he came to a house buried in salt. A woman lived inside, her skin peeled from too much sun. She offered him tea brewed from roots he couldn’t name. “I’ve been trying to grow silence,” she said, “but it keeps dying.”

He stayed a day. Maybe two. He forgot his boots there.

Further along, he met a man building a church out of sea glass. “It’s not for God,” the man said. “It’s for remembering what water used to feel like.”

They sat in the nave as fish skeletons clattered in the wind. When the man wept, the cartographer found he wept too. Not out of pity, but recognition.

Still, the map remained blank.

In the seventh town, he met children who had never seen rain. They asked if he had brought any. He handed them the notebook instead. “Draw water,” he said. “Even if you’ve never touched it.”

They filled the pages with blue spirals, thin waves, droplets that smiled.

Only then did the pen move for him.

He wrote not lines or borders, but names. The name of the woman with her dying silence. The man who built the sea glass church. The children with their imaginary rain. He wrote them all, and with each name, the map began to change.

Mountains unfolded. Rivers that hadn’t flowed in decades inked their way back onto the paper. A pulse returned to the soil.

When he looked up, he was no longer alone.

All around him were others: barefoot, burned, blooming. Some he had met. Others he hadn't. They each held maps of their own—but the maps were bleeding into each other, pages curling and reaching.

They did not speak.

They didn’t need to.

The world had only ever been waiting for them to remember—
that there was never a map unless we walked it together.
That no one survives the end alone.

Conclusion

The wealthy have an inordinate amount of power over the climate crisis, and instead of using it to help implement a just transition to renewable energy, they exploit a vastly disproportionate amount of our remaining carbon budget. So what can we do about this injustice? While our individual action may not be able to offset the damage these huge polluters wreak, we do still have power. One person composting might not make a difference, but a whole community composting and growing food locally could start to make a real impact. Advocating for local, city, and state-based legislation is essential to helping combat the climate crisis, because the individuals with the means to help are evidently not going to do anything about it.