Folded map

No map ever folds back the way it left the factory.

Open it once —a petrol station, a detour, August— and it becomes another animal: it grows ridges, valleys, mountain ranges the cartographers never planned for.

My father could tame one in three moves, over the steering wheel. I return them to the glovebox the way you'd shut in a bird.

These days a calm voice recalculates my route. I have never got lost so correctly.

But at the bottom of the glovebox the country is still folded wrong, and every crease keeps an August.