the fifty second story

When I was 9 years old, we were moving away from Florida. My mom wanted us to wake up early enough to see the sun rise over the water, and to look for turtle nests hatching. We were too late for the turtles, but there was one little one that wasn't making it past the breakers. My mom carried it out, but it washed back up, anyway. We took it to the turtle rescue place, and they told us that its flippers had been chewed by crabs and it wouldn't be able to swim, but they would send it to the aquarium, and it would get prosthetics. I believed them. I believed them until I was telling this story, not more than a year ago, and got to the point of saying the thing about prosthetic flippers and realized, all those years later, that it was almost certainly a lie you tell to children.