Cracked skin filled with handwritten words on a back

The lake went down another hand's breadth this week, and Mr Okonedo says it will not come back before the autumn rains, if they come at all. You asked in your last letter whether the cracks are as bad as the papers say. They are worse, and stranger. The mud has split into plates the size of cartwheels, their edges curling up like old pastry, and somebody, I still do not know who, has been going out at dawn with a pen and writing in the gaps. Words in brown script, stubborn as ink, not washed away by anything.

I walked out to the bank on Tuesday with the surveyor's chain and copied what I could. Pain, sorrow, sugar, the word "truth" twice, and a line about bread that I did not understand. In one split as wide as my palm someone had written "bring the boats back" and then crossed it out so hard the nib tore through the paper beneath. I took the sheet to the schoolmaster, and he went pale and said his sister had written the same thing on the chapel wall the summer before she left.

Yesterday the mud shifted under my boots and a crack opened past the old tide mark. At the bottom, where the light barely reached, was a word I had not yet copied: home. The ink was fresh. I have decided to stay until the water comes back, if it does, and see who is still writing.