Advice for Aspiring Cartographers

i.

Before you begin, you should know it’s rotten work. Ask your fingers if they can bear to touch all the filthy kingdoms of the world. Ask them if they ever hope to wash off the stains.

ii.

There once was an unmoored, unmanned ship buccaneers sought through rope-coils of brume. Inside the phantom vessel, a driftwood altar—atop it a single tin mug. Dipping the mug into the sea to drink from the deep, teeth coated in saltwater communion, the pirates bit down on their tarnished blades and burst forth into battle believing themselves the once-and-future victors.

(The seabed had already built their graves.)

iii.

You might be tempted to fog the edges of lands, make them fuzzysoft, file away at their sharpness until your eraser is but a stub and the monsoon-whorls of your fingers charcoal-dark.

Don’t.

I can tell you right now that I chose to focus on the sea and everything thereof. Let the eroded coastline be. The serrated cliffs, slumbering underwater volcanoes, the hollowed-out caves, too. The parts where people dug away at the earth until their homes became islands, became impenetrable forts.

Learn to preserve the sharpness. Cut your fingers against it all.

iv.

There once was a man diving for sea sponges, sole currency of his barren island. His boat mates watched him leap overboard, counting the minutes his naked form stayed under, a burly-chested chorus chanting hymns passed down from old.

A nomadic siren heard them, intrigued by the reversal of roles. She drifted along the current of their melody and found the diver fumbling on the seafloor, fingers scouring seaweed and sand. With sun-streaked hair and earthen skin, the man would look perfect in her anchor-chain of tempted argonauts and fishermen.

The siren keened her ethereal ballad louder than his boat mates or his sponge-hungry hands, winding medusa tendrils of hair around him. The diver slipped through them as easily as a smelt escaping a badly-patched net. He broke panting through the surface, arms full of porous yellow sponges, their waterlogged bodies absorbing the crashing waves of his heartbeat.

That night, he went home to his husband. Together they huddled by the fire, pressing curious fingers to mauvish sucker marks.

(The siren still waits, hoarse-voiced and empty-handed.)

v.

A cartographer is a history-teller. There’s something to be said for impartiality. You mustn’t stretch or shrink borders, erase the blood soaked into the soil or flushed through the water like sharkbait. You mustn’t be swayed by bright-eyed princesses ruling kingdoms by the ocean or foul-mouthed seafarers burning brighter than the imported cigars hanging off their fishhook lips. Sea serpents’ tearful laments or savage shanties should not keep you up at night, should not make your ribcage feel as if it might crack open under pressure, mussel-like.

But when they do, keep vigil until morning, chasing the night with heady ale and stale hardtack.

vi.

There once was a godling whose dominions were sand dollars, sun dogs, and other precious, fleeting things. They fell in love with a sailor’s wife, goddess of climbing up steep rocks, staring at storm-tossed waves, and waiting for white homecoming sails (but always fearing the funerary-black ones).

The godling considered tickling Boreas’ nose with a seagull feather until he sneezed, blowing the husband’s homebound ship off course. They thought about the woman joining their coral-crimsoned domain, to create sea glass out of broken beer bottles and nacreous pearls out of sand grits by their side for all their windswept eternity.

I want you, the words lodged like a fish bone in their throat. The godling watched from their cumulus cloud. They saw their own longing reflected in the woman’s eyes turned seaward. Goddess of waiting, of bow-legged body buffeted by the elements, of lighting candles every night to half-forgotten patron saints of please, please don’t drown.

And so the godling took to the sea with their nebular boat, directing echolocation prayers to dolphins: please save this dreadful mortal, this would-be drowning man, please let him mount your grayslick backs.

They didn’t stay for the happy couple’s reunion.

(The godling had no desire to fathom the fleetingness, the permanence, the salinity of their own heartbreak.)

vii.

Let’s talk about scale, about the mountains and pebbles, the sperm whales and amoebae. It’s easy to lose yourself, be rendered a shipwreck with no tincture or ornate-labeled phial to chug down and become you again. It’s easier still to see the blade of seagrass or lucky-charm black coral and miss the reef.

The flying fish cackle to one another, a maritime limerick about your hubris, moving your creations across an enamel chessboard. 1:1 million. Smaller, bigger, no?

Pick your ratio carefully.

Who will you exclude from your history of this watery world?

viii.

There once was a selkie who stole her own skin before any suitor could snatch it She buried her seal-hide with its memory far away so that she couldn’t find her old self if she tried. The fish nibbled on her shrugged-off pelt, the birds’ beaks plucked the fish, and up the food chain she went until a speck of her could be found in every crevice of the world.

The selkie roamed freely the shores and pelagi. She mingled with man and creature, woman and beast. In old age, in an island hospice, with oil-spill cancer on her too-human skin, the selkie remembered her former seal-hide: her insulation from the world, the aegis shielding the marvels of uncharted territories from view.

She thanked the fish, squid, and albatross. Before she slept at last, the primordial lullabies of seals singing her down, she spared a thought to her old lovers as well.

(I may have been one of them.)

ix.

Before you buy all the requisite instruments—your compass, sextant, and vernier, your parchment, ink, and pinion quills, your books of astral navigation—make sure you have what it takes stored up inside your hold. There are things that cannot be unetched from one’s veins and ventricles.

Let me tell you about the blueprint inkstains, the callouses and cramps, the salt-encrusted eyes, the rocking boats and whale-fat oil lamps. Perhaps the mainland would be kinder on you. Pick up your graphite nib and sketch a forest that has never felt the sea breeze on its oaken skin.

The ocean is known for its mercurial undertows. You must have a sturdy pair of lungs to bask in the waves’ rippling light.

x.

At night, I listen to the sea and all the tales the lapping waves whisper to me. Sometimes, I wake up, the wind an open-palmed slap against wet cheeks. There’s something to be said for staying. You learn to love the accumulated barnacles, the ink that never seems to wash out.

And in return, when the time comes, place your trust in the water to lick you smooth and clean.

© 2023 Avra Margariti

About the Author

Avra Margariti is a queer author and Pushcart-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Vastarien, Asimov's, Strange Horizons, F&SF, The Deadlands, Lackington's, and Reckoning. Avra lives and studies in Athens, Greece. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).