Next morning the vessel was no more in the lagoon and neither any trace of her. Hard to say the reason for their visit. Not to replenish their supply of fresh water anyways.

The lagoon’s water body might be a junction in their traffic routes or else a rendezvous spot to hang out with seals in divers suites. I dunno…

However, to decide the day of week is easy as pie, each and every day here is Friday. Ha! And no less. The most best of the best days in the week full of yummy expectancy to live a little at long last, since you’re thru the working week.

So now, precisely last Friday, that is yesterday, in harmony with my constant pre-dinner habit, I came down to the beach and stretched out in the palm-tree shade because the sand temperature beyond it is too scorching in the sun. And there lay I enjoying peace of mind, and the general state of imperturbation as it usually is on Friday nearing the dinner time and rather evidently so. The fingers of my both hands laced under around the back of my head, I watched from the supine position the vast serenity of the brine expanse behind the monumental sight of the sea shell stuck in the middle of the beach.

It’s a bivalve, as the majority of its fresh-water counterparts which, as an inquisitive kid, you scraped out in the shallows of ponds and rivers, but the selfish shellfish latch themselves from inside and there are no means to break in until you let them bask for some time in the fire embers.

But this here mollusk beats them all, some overseas wonder, you can’t grab it – whew! caliber 1.5 meters, and the corresponding weight of over 500 pounds. However, the valves are rounded, not oval as by their tribe in the fresh water. And watch this exotic finishing, both luxurious and equatorial, fanning off from the hinges that connect the two half-spheres, running all the way to the rounded edges in a kinda basso-rilievo of cable-thick gimp trimming worked over with the finest polish, as if Ural serf artisans were sharing the know-how of malachite processing based on the local raw materials.

Deep in myself, I’ve baptized this ogres with the name of Pec-tin-din and it baffles me to guess why. The scallop-like bottom of this huge cauldron has half-buried in the sand, sunk as deep as the Peccy’s weight forces it to enter, and the lid remains somewhat raised, like for airing.

But there’s nothing inside to air. Peccy had passed away to better world before my getting to Isle of No Time, not a shred of her mantle stayed behind in between the valves, all's shell-lifted, looted, scraped, gnawed, swept up and taken away, and only this bare calcium structure still tarries in the sand of the beach…

Of dust art thou knocked together and dust art thou to become…

Well, not quite Friday thoughts rolled up and, in unison to them, some wind began to whine in gusts whose unevenness furnished those wails a certain emotional curve, like, say, grief lamentations, “O, woe! Peccy! Why have you left me!”

Besides, with a noteworthy brashness, the wind blew radically athwart the direction of monsoon winds that on Friday, in a stably predictable manner, blow either to the shore or off it. But no! This bitchy one pulls alongside the shoreline! Some crying anomaly, this hydra of counter-hydrometeorology!

A split-moment before shining radiantly, the azure of the sky went out, squeezed by the cephalopod mollusk of the heavy black cloud unwinding, spreading its distorted tentacle-protuberances all over the firmament.

The waves dropped out of caressing languidly the shore in the habitual foreplay and, all of a sudden, sprung erect and wheeling, their tips amok foaming at the mouth, and rushed to crash their whole mass against the beach spread out in the boot-licking kowtow.