THE MAP WE ARE NOT ON

Prokop's village did not die of fire or plague. It was erased by one line in a register, where a place called Burn became a locality, burn, with a small letter – and an empty place, the clerk explains without any malice at all, has no heirs. So he signs on as a porter with the Unified Survey, the very project that unmade him, and walks east carrying his father's chest of twenty-two years of unanswered petitions. A map is not the land. A map is somebody's decision about the land.