Last Minute Find

The summer was over. Three months in the jungle, and my internship was turning out to be a bust. I had a few terra cotta shards, a journal full of leaf rubbings, and the tapes from an interview with some rambling tribesman about local ghost stories. It was junk. I had to go back to school and write twenty pages on my time here, and I didn’t even have enough to fill a postcard home.

“JAMES! REGGIE! GUYS!” Lisa would call out whenever she found anything, but we had learned by now to take our time responding. It was usually nothing.

Half an hour later, I found Lisa and Reggie at the dig site. They were looking at some kind of tablet, a thin stone disk with a strange symbol. I have to admit, it was the most interesting thing we had seen all summer, and I was curious. I took the tablet and examined the etchings: it was a pair of birds circling each other. Something about this was so familiar...

“No way.”

“What is it, James?” Reggie had his notebook out. He was obsessive about keeping notes on everything we did here.

I turned the stone tablet over. “I heard about this. In that interview we did with the tribe down river. These stones are messages, sent between villages.”

Lisa shot me a quizzical look, “Like a letter?”

“No, more like an envelope. The message is inside.”

I looked at my two classmates. What was there to lose, with our internship almost over? Before they could stop me, I smashed the tablet on the ground. They gasped.

“Don’t worry! Let’s see what’s inside. I bet it’s worth an A+ for each of us.”