7:52pm: loaded laundry and coins into dryer. Have been thinking ‘you live on the beach, walk on the beach, do stuff there, soon it’ll be winter.’ Got e-cigarette and phone from room and walked along the shore, at first trying to not get wet, then standing in place calf-height in the water, letting it flush in and out with me in the middle. Not many people on the beach. A few men were fishing, they had put a pole in the ground. Two or three were sometimes lifted off the ground by parasail-style kites. An oyster shell bumped my foot in the water. Tried to hold onto it with my toes. The tide pushed something that looked like a turtle back and forth. It was upsidedown the next time I saw it. Definitely a turtle. The waves washed it on the sand for a moment and it walked confusedly. I walked away. A fishermen said ‘is that a turtle? You should’ve picked it up.’ I said ‘oh I didn’t know if it was supposed to be there, you know, like ‘sea turtles?” He said ‘we got two of them already.’ I thought something negative about turtle fishing. Waded into the water with him. He said ‘that’s a fresh water turtle, fresh water. There’s probably a lot more, we keep finding them.’ He picked it up and ‘presented’ it to me. Its head and limbs were retracted into its shell. He said ‘look, there it is.’ I put my face close to it and pointed almost close enough to be touching it and said ‘aw look it, turtle.’ The man’s friend said ‘we should give it to those ladies, they took the other two, giving ‘em to a pet shop or something.’ The men yelled ‘hey!’ and ‘hey ladies!’ to a small group of women. I pointed and yelled ‘turtle!’ Felt like the three of us were ‘in this’ together. Turtle alert squad. Look out, pet stores. The women were almost where the sand meets the road. They stopped walking and turned around. The first man said ‘whaddya wanna name it, you wanna name it?’ He was smiling incredulously. Felt like I had just been ‘tagged.’ I looked at the retracted turtle head and said ‘uh. Kenny.’ The man laughed and said ‘Kenny?’ He looked at me like I had just said a maybe inappropriate inside joke, a ‘too soon to make this joke’ joke. I said ‘yeah, Kenny, see ya later Kenny.’ The man laughed and jogged to the women, now walking towards the water. I looked at the other man by the fishing pole stuck in the ground. I said ‘you don’t think it’s a sea turtle though, do you?’ He said ‘nah, no way. There’s probably a lot more where that one came from.’ I said ‘why is it there?’ He said ‘I don’t know,’ looking in the distance, ‘they just keep showing up.’ My body was turning away. Could feel myself looking for an ‘out’ to the conversation. I said ‘well, good luck, hope you find more,’ unsure if more turtles were what he wanted to find.