Script quote tattoo on a back

You will think I have finally lost the plot, writing to you on paper like the old women at the Mill Road post office, but the relay tower on Hollin Ridge went down again on Tuesday and the only messages that get through are the ones folded small enough to ride the freight drones. So here I am, with the last pencil stub from the scrap tin and a sheet of the good cream stock you hoarded in the back of the wardrobe.

The salvage crew came in from the coast with a crate of pre-collapse denim, the kind with the stitched arcs on the back pockets, and a box of sewing kits that still smell of mothballs. Hektor traded two tins of lentils for a pair of shorts that had no holes in them and I told him he had been robbed. He laughed. He said the shorts were older than both of us and deserved a better owner than the man who had them. We are, all of us, a little too fond of the things we cannot replace.

You asked me last winter whether the words on the wall of the old chapel meant anything now that nobody reads English any more. I have been thinking about it. Yesterday I found the chapel door unlatched and the plaster inside half gone, but the letters were still there, black and steady under the damp. No regrets. Somebody scratched them into a wall before any of us were born and nobody has been able to scrub them out. I suppose that is the only thing I wanted to tell you. Come up before the frost. Bring the thread.