A tall, thin man walks quietly along the beach, feet washed over by the rolling waves. He picks a seashell up from the ground and lifts it up to the sky where the details of the shell are lost in a silhouette around the aura of sunlight. He has created an eclipse which he stares into intensely, wondering between thoughts of priorities and lovers if he will soon go blind. The details of the shell are all but lost without the direct influence of the sun, but they reveal themselves through tiny refractions of light bouncing off the sand and into his hand as he hands the shell to an apparation of a woman who is now blissfully accepting the seashell as if it were the greatest gift she ever received. She smiles at the thin man and holds the shell to her ear. He is intrigued by this mermaid on the beach, and trusting of her, but onlookers are in wonder as they see a thin man, alone on a beach, with a seashell floating before his eyes. They wonder if he is a magician.
The mermaid and the magician walk together under the setting sun and the onlookers retreat to their homes in awe, to tell the story of what they just saw. The mermaid invites him to the ocean, to meet the King of the Sea. The magician is afflicted by this invitation for as a child, he once drowned. He asks to hold the sea shell once more. It is larger now than it has ever been before. He smiles at the mermaid who seems to have disappeared back into the ocean, where she swims away gracefully laughing and coercing the magician to swim to her.
The magician looks at the seashell and watches the ocean. He notices the ocean is on a decline, like a snowy slope in Northern Canada that he once had performed his most magnificent of illusions on. A dog watches the magician curiously as he stumbles nervously toward the mermaid in the ocean, which the dog cannot see. The dog advances closer and begins barking. The magician is afraid of dogs and begins to run toward the mermaid until the depth of the water has matched his height and he hops on the seashell, now the size of a small dingy.
Like a vessel of fear and intent, completely sentient, it carries him off to the mermaid where they meet in mid sea and kiss until the weight of their consummation forces them to the sea bed. The magician is breathing and thinks, "This is my greatest illusion yet," and the mermaid releases herself from their liplock. Suddenly he loses his breath and panicks.
The air from his lungs escape him and his fright immobilizes him. He can only see the light from the sun fading on the ocean ceiling and soon he is sinking into a tight, body sized cave. The mermaid, lands on his body and kisses him, floating back up toward the shore. He cannot chase her and with his last breaths and remaining sources of light information he can see the seashell sink gently over him as it covers the only exit to the cave.
Now the magician can breath, but he is afraid to break this containment space. He ponders for hours about whether or not he wants to be reintroduced into the seemingly deadly sea. Soon after he becomes famished, in a way he's never felt and he laughs uncontrollably, almost insanely, as he kicks off the seashell cover and it floats up back towards the sky, once again eclipsing the light. The seashell cuts in an out of the path of light like a strobe casting sporadic shadows and he sees, in slow motion, that he has grown a pair of fins.
