Дэвид (2013)

Title: *David (2013)*

In a fog-cloaked coastal town where the docks creak like old bones, David—a mechanic with a map tattooed on his wrist he’s never understood—finds a message in a bottle after a storm. The paper is salt-brittle, the ink smudged, but his name glares back, written in a hand he doesn’t recognize. The town whispers of shipwrecks, but the elders shut doors when he asks why the dates in the message match a drowned crew’s last voyage.

His garage reeks of motor oil and seaweed now. Stranger still: more bottles wash in, each older than the last, as if the sea itself is unraveling time. The lighthouse keeper burns ledgers in the dead of night. A historian with nicotine-yellowed fingers claims she knew his father, who vanished years ago, muttering about “debts to the deep.”

David’s tattoo itches when tides shift. The map’s symbols mirror markings on the cliffs—where the town’s children dare each other to climb. But the higher he ascends, the clearer it becomes: the rocks below aren’t littered with driftwood, but with anchors. Old ones. Hundreds.

Can he trust the historian’s crumbling photos of his father standing waist-deep in black water, grinning like a man who’d made a bargain? Or will the town’s silence, thicker than the fog, drown the truth forever?

*The bottles keep coming. The tides don’t lie. But neither do the scars on the sea’s back.*