Turtles and cars

So y’all already know about me and my animal-saving ways. I always want to save poor little animals from squashy deaths on public thoroughfares. I saved a raccoon recently, and on my 21st birthday I tried really hard to save a toad though I don’t know what happened to it, and one time I saved a little cute dog, which is the shining star, really, on my saving things record, as the dog was eventually reunited with his owner in a joyful rollicking Wivenhoe park reunion.

I only mention this because I am doing this new thing where I go for walks, even though it’s as hot as the hinges of hell and I hate the heat with a hot hate, and yesterday I didn’t want to even more than I have not wanted to on the previous two days that I have done this. Because yesterday I was going to hang out with my lovely friend later on that evening, and that meant I had to go walking early, which meant it was much sunnier and therefore much hotter. And yesterday it would have been so easy just to not go. I could have just washed my hair straight away when I got home, and read my book about psychiatry, and worked on this big project I’m doing, or covered my books in contact paper and watched interviews with Stephen Fry on YouTube.

But I went walking, and it is a good thing (mercy, I am using a lot of italics today; I blame this on my recent rereading of Emily Climbs), because as I was on my way back to my apartment, I was rounding a slightly busy curve, and as a car came round the curve in one lane, I spotted in the other lane a great big turtle plodding across the road. It had a nice little face, and more cars were coming in the first lane, towards which the turtle was headed with plodding certainty. Fortunately I was there to save him. I flung myself out in front of the moving cars to stop them from continuing on their path of destruction, and gently scooped up the turtle and brought him to safety by a nearby creek.

(My mother is reading this and having a heart attack. I’m just kidding, Mother. I did not fling myself into oncoming traffic in order to save the turtle. That wouldn’t have helped, they would have just swerved to avoid me and hit the turtle anyway. Merely corroborative detail to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.)

Of course, afterwards I realized that I had taken the poor turtle back to the exact place that he was crossing the street to get away from. It reminded me of this story I once wrote with Nezabeth when we were much smaller, all about a little turtle called Fortinbras who lived in a lake that was called Deep Clear Lake but it should have been called Shallow Dirty Lake because that is what the lake was, and Fortinbras yearned for something more. This turtle probably poked its head back out of its shell after I put it down and was like, FUCK. I just LEFT HERE.

Oh well. At least it isn’t dead. I saved it!