Marked, Not Kept
Maya sat down slowly in the chair.
The first was a road map. Paper, the real kind, folded and refolded so many times the creases had gone furry, and there were nineteen years on that map — pen lines and pencil lines and biro that had run out halfway across Missouri, routes doubling back on themselves, whole states crossed out. A life, drawn.
Down at the bottom left, in red, somebody had drawn a circle around a piece of empty desert eighty miles south of where Maya was sitting.
It had been gone over four or five times. The pen had torn the paper.