The Green Archive

Your grandmother drew the map on the back of a shipping manifest, and she drew it from memory, and she never once said how she came to have the memory.

The jungle went quiet the way an audience goes quiet. The corridor breathed around you, a slow mechanical exhale that made the overhead lights shiver. You counted the seconds between flickers the way you had been taught: four, then three, then one. Whatever kept the timing was getting impatient.