A man with a bald head, grey goatee, neon pink swim trunks, and silver cross necklace nudges a crab with his toe. It doesn’t move. He flips it over to see if the birds had already picked it clean. They hadn’t. He picks it up with two fingers and gently tosses the corpse into the ocean.
A woman and her young daughter, both wearing bikinis and baseball caps, walk along the water’s edge. They constantly bend down to look at one shell or another. It takes them half an hour to walk fifteen yards.
A pod of dolphins swims by. Their fins gently emerge from and resubmerge into the ripples of the ocean’s surface.
A brown dog bounds through the water, tongue lolling to one side.
I close my eyes and tilt my face up to the sun. It kisses my cheek. I forget, for a moment, about the mask tucked inside my bag.
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