The Plastic Fragments of a Broken Sea Turtle Heart

cw: references to near-death experiences 

1. Sea turtles, like most reptiles, have three-chambered hearts.

There's no sound more unsettling than your own heart beating inside your head. It reminds Cheryl of her mortality—every time she lays her head down on her pillow the wrong way, and her pulse pounds against her skull like the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on her door every Sunday to remind her that she won't live forever.

Neither will turtles, but she’s never heard a Jehovah’s Witness talk about turtles. Turtle mortality was never a topic Cheryl consciously considered either, until she found one washed up on the foaming Hollywood shoreline one night, its slimy, lethargic body glistening under a half-moon.

She'd read once somewhere that some turtles live one-hundred-and-fifty years, but in the grand scheme of things, one-hundred-and-fifty years was only a fraction of forever.

***

2. Turtles show affection by following you around with their eyes or head.

Cheryl waits with the turtle until help arrives. She does not know who will show up or when they will show up—or even what people who rescue sea turtles look like.

The turtle, who she's named Richard in the thirty-five minutes they've been alone together on the sand, follows her every movement with his small black eyes. It's the only part of his body still moving, watching her intently as she twists off the lid of her half-empty Sprite bottle and tells him it's going to be okay.

***

3. It's estimated that over half of all sea turtles have tried it or will try it at some point in their lives. 

Doug, the turtle paramedic who shows up, looks like anyone else—a dad, a brother, someone behind you in line at 7-11, only a someone who knows an absurd amount about green sea turtles.

He calls himself a Rehabilitation Specialist, not a turtle paramedic, and, with gloved hands, puts Richard in a large cardboard box that, in another life, transported bananas.

"Is he going to be okay?" Cheryl asks before Doug takes Richard away.

"I don't know. He probably ate plastic. Most sea turtles try it at one point or another." 

The way Doug phrases it makes it sound as if Richard snorted cocaine, as if all adolescent green sea turtles his age will try it, as Doug put it, at one point or another.

Cheryl imagines what might be inside Richard's stomach at this very moment. Perhaps a plastic Barbie purse or one of those spiky blue plastic rings around the necks of SunnyD bottles. Or in a tragic coincidence, the same pink cap of a dollar-store pregnancy test she threw away five years ago in college. 

"Can't he just puke it out?" asks Cheryl

Doug laughs and looks down at her now-empty bottle of Sprite. "Turtles can't puke."

***

4. Plastic makes sea turtles float. 

At one point during the rescue (which turns out to be nothing more than Doug putting Richard in a banana box), Doug tells Cheryl that Richard can probably float in water.

"It's called Floating Syndrome," he explains. "The plastic in their stomachs makes them buoyant."

As Cheryl sits alone in the wet sand, and Doug disappears with Richard in what now seems like a banana-box coffin, she imagines Richard's tired, confused body floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean like a yellow rubber duck.

***

5. Sea turtles don't have teeth. 

When Cheryl brushes her aching molars that night, she's disturbed by the amount of plastic in her bathroom alone. Half-filled tubs of peppermint lotion. Tubes of gel that promised to erase fine lines, wrinkles, and perhaps also the remaining 85,000 green sea turtles still floating around in the ocean. 

As she rinses her mouth, Cheryl imagines one of Richard's offspring wearing the cap of her toothpaste like a tiny Colgate crown. The image makes her nauseated enough to never want to touch plastic again.

Over the next month, Cheryl promises to change in honor of Richard. She reasons that if turtles can live without plastic, so can humans. 

For the rest of May, Cheryl cuts apart the six-pack rings that hold together her cans of Diet Pepsi. She buys a bamboo brush on Amazon. She starts to treat her single-use plastic less like a one-night stand and more like a forever husband. 

However, by the end of May, plastic seeps back through the cracks of her daily routine. The stupid pasty balls of eco-friendly deodorant make her armpits sting, and the organic, gritty shampoo bars that smell like grass make her hair so frizzy she can no longer ease her mind with the fact that a head of frizzy hair is much better than a blanket of sick, floating turtles covering the ocean. 

To be honest, Cheryl never thought much about turtles before Richard. 

She knew they weren’t doing well, per se. It just wasn’t human nature to think twice about the turtles, unless those turtles were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

But unlike the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, these turtles were weak, buoyant, and ate magic marker caps instead of cheese pizza. Cheryl never cared about turtles, until that night Richard looked her dead in the eye, mistook her as his savior, not understanding that she was the one who put him down on the shore to begin with, the one who bloated his stomach with the sharp fragments of objects that made only a marginal difference in her everyday life. 

She promises to change eventually, when the time is right, vowing to, at one point or another, make her carbon footprint as small as Cinderella's glass, plastic-free slipper.

***

6. Sea turtles can't tell the difference between plastic and food.

By the time Cheryl has her first child, she’s mostly forgotten about Richard—about her plastic-free stint and her go-green fever.

Cheryl is too busy to think about sick turtles. She has a child to keep alive—a now three-year-old boy named Xavier who loves to play kitchen, pretending to grill plastic meat patties and drink from plastic grape juice boxes he half-believes are real. 

*** 

7.  Sea turtles can slow their heart rate up to nine minutes between heartbeats.

A lot can happen in nine minutes. 

You can fold your laundry.

You can throw out old Tupperware.

And according to the plastic wrapper on the pre-cut cookie dough, in nine minutes, you can bake a dozen cookies.

When the cookies come out of the oven, it takes another nine minutes for them to cool. Once they do, Xavier grabs them, shoveling them down his throat so fast Cheryl yells at him to slow down.

***

8. Sometimes sea turtles look like they’re crying, even though they are not. 

Cheryl doesn’t think about Richard again until she finds Xavier one day sitting cross-legged on the carpet of his bedroom, making a high-pitched whistle that reminds her of a seabird.

He looks like he wants to cry.

Cheryl once read in a book somewhere that sometimes sea turtles look like they're crying. If you ever see one up close, they shed tiny salt tears, as if they know what's happening to them, as if they know there's a piece of a plastic doll head living inside their stomach.

But it turns out, they're not crying. They're just excreting excess salt that they cannot pee or puke out, through the tear ducts that are too small for the bits and pieces of bottle caps, tampon applicators, and Happy Meal toys to escape from.

She kneels down to his level, but he cannot bring himself to cry. His ribs pull inward, and her hands shake as she dials for help.

The woman on the other end tells her, too calmly, to make a fist, to then lodge that fist under his belly button and cover it with her other hand, to push and push until whatever it is comes out.

It's a Lego. A stupid red Lego, now lying on the carpet covered in mucus. He inhales desperately, like someone’s who’s been underwater for the last ten years.

Word travels fast, and changes from ear to ear. He swallowed a Lego. He broke his leg. He has bronchitis. He has a tumor.

Depending on what they hear, neighbors come bearing presents that weekend—stuffed animals with glittery plastic eyes, plastic get-well balloons, and flowers wrapped in crinkly cellophane.

"It's really not a big deal," Cheryl tells them, but they insist, adding one by one to the plastic nest of presents that, to the untrained eye, might look like food.