At the beach, after I’d been swimming and had returned to the shore and had made my way up the sand to where I’d left my towel and my flip flops, but before I’d started toward the boardwalk, along which I needed to wander to reach the stairs that led down to the sidewalk that separated the seaside from the neighborhood in which was the train that had brought me here, I saw at my feet, while I was drying my torso and my legs, a shell from which emerged, when I picked it up to look at it, a crab or a crustacean that scurried away before I had a chance to drop the very object in which it had been hiding.