Creases that outnumber roads

The state road map achieves its factory fold exactly once, at the plant, by a machine built for the purpose; every fold after belongs to someone in a hurry, and none of them match. A panel goes the wrong way first, forcing the next panel into a crease it was never engineered for, until the whole sheet closes at a slight angle and bulges faintly in the glovebox, refusing to lie flat under the owner's manual the way it once did. The paper is thin enough to read a headline through from the other side and tough enough to survive being refolded wrong for years running, a durability at odds with everything else about it. Inside, a network of red, blue, and black lines renders an entire state legible at a glance, county by county, at a scale no phone screen has ever attempted to show all at once. The mileage chart in the corner still assumes two named cities as the only destinations worth measuring between. Rest areas are marked with a small icon nobody has updated in years. A gas station chain long since sold to a different gas station chain still advertises across the bottom margin, printed the year the map itself was printed, some years back now, filed under a coffee cup and an ice scraper, folded wrong, waiting for a phone to lose its signal at the one moment that would justify keeping it.

Beatrice Womack