“This is crap,” I mutter. “And I think one of the pigs is sick.”
The smell still makes me gag. I’ve been feeding the pigs, sleeping with the pigs, and recycling their manure for nearly a month and I’m still not used to it. Not that my new friends smell any better.
I’m starting to pick up their language, but they still think I’m a dimwit. They’re right. I can’t even see, now that my one pair of contact lenses is done for. So I’m the new pig-boy. I don’t ask what happened to the old one, but I wonder sometimes why the hogs look so much plumper than the average villager. Reading and writing has no currency if there’s no one to write to.
But I still write letters to Amy. Carved on rocks, in tree trunks, scratched in dirt.
I’m so sorry.
You’re not a small-minded coward.
Some archaeologist will find them some day.
And Amy will know that I went back in time to unsay what I said. And that I didn’t have the faintest clue how to work a time machine. And that I was too cheap to buy fuel for the return trip.