How to Fold a World Map

by Tiffany Harris

The third time the ICU called, I was folding Mongolia. The crease ran straight through Ulaanbaatar, crisp and irreversible. You have to be careful with these things, the way paper remembers every fold, every pressure, every hand that ever tried to smooth it back to what it was before.

At your bedside, the maps pile up, pressed flat under an old biology textbook, the wieght never quite enough to undo what I’ve done. I’ve folded the continents in ways they were never meant to bend. You don’t notice. Your fingers, small and bird-boned, worry the corner of your blanket instead.

‘You’ll tear it,” I say but your gaze is distant, caught somewhere between the IV pole and the darkened window. I know that stare. It’s the same one I wear when the nurses ask if I want anything — water, food, sleep. Things I used to need before all of this.

You ask me what I’m making today. I tell you it’s a crane, but that’s a lie. The truth is, I don;t know. I keep folding, keep pressing my thumb along fault lines that don’t exist.

You’ve started doing this thing where you close your eyes mid-conversation, as if testing how the world feels without looking at it. I try not to count how long they stay shut. I try not to notice when you take longer to reopen them.

That night, I sit in the hard plastic chair and watch your chest rise and fall in time with the heart monitor. You sleep like you are trying to hold onto something, but in the morning, you reach for me instead.In your hands, a crumpled thing, creases running wild across its surface.

“It’s a heart,” you say. “For you.”

You smooth the Pacific first, careful not to tear Japan.

About the Author

Tiffany Harris

Tiffany Harris is a flash fiction author and sales enabler living in NorCal who hasn’t been the same since Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout discovered the world doesn’t wait for garbage to take itself out. She is the winner of the Tadpole Press 100-Word Writing Contest and has been longlisted for SmokeLong Quarterly’s Grand Micro Prize (The Mikey) and the Not Quite Write Prize with words appearing or forthcoming in Black Glass Pages, Humana Obscura, WestWord, Buckman Journal, and elsewhere. When not writing, she’s busy convincing herself that sarcasm counts as cardio.