The fisherman came to the shore early in the morning, as he did almost every Saturday. The sky had already cleared, but the air still carried traces of yesterday’s storm. During the night, a powerful squall had passed through, the wind pushing waves straight onto the land, and the sea had thrown all kinds of debris onto the shore: pieces of wood, seaweed, plastic bottles, and rusted fragments of metal.
The man walked slowly across the wet, muddy ground in rubber boots, looking for a place where he could calmly set up his fishing rod. He liked to fish in silence, which was why he always chose secluded spots.
That was when he noticed something strange. A thin piece of metal wire was sticking out of the thick mud.
At first, he wanted to ignore it. After a storm, things like that often ended up on the shore. But something about that wire felt unsettling. It was sticking out almost vertically, as if it were attached to something.
The man stepped closer, bent down, and tried to pull it with his fingers.
The wire didn’t budge.
So he grabbed it with both hands and pulled harder. The ground around it shifted, but whatever was underneath seemed deeply embedded in the mud.
“WHAT COULD THAT BE…” he muttered under his breath, bracing his feet more firmly in the slippery ground.
He pulled again. First carefully, then with increasing force. The mud seemed unwilling to give up its find, as if it were sucking it back in. The man felt the wire cutting into his hands through his gloves. Several times he felt like giving up, but his curiosity was stronger.
He yanked it from side to side, pulling in short bursts, pausing every now and then to catch his breath.
Finally, the ground made a dull, sticky sound. Something heavy began to slowly emerge from the mud.
The man gave one last strong tug, and the object finally popped free. He barely managed to catch it before it slipped back into the muck.
The object had a strange shape.
Its entire surface was covered in a thick layer of mud, making it impossible to recognize what it was. It was rounded in places, angular in others — and that gave him an uneasy feeling.
The man felt a chill run down his spine.
“I HOPE IT’S NOT…” he thought, and without hesitation, he headed toward the water with it.
He stepped up to the shore and began carefully washing the mud off. The waves splashed against the object as he scraped away the sticky dirt with his hands, trying to understand what exactly he had pulled from the ground. And when he finally saw what it was, he froze in shock 😱😲
First, a smooth surface appeared. Then the outline of a nose. Then the lips. The man froze.
Another layer of mud washed away, and from the water a familiar face with stone curls looked back at him.
He straightened up abruptly and stared at the object. It was the head of a statue of Alexander Pushkin.
For several seconds, he stood in silence. Just moments earlier, he had been convinced that he had pulled something related to a crime out of the mud, and in his mind he had already considered calling the police.
Now the situation seemed almost absurd to him.
Apparently, someone had thrown an old sculpture into the sea, and the night storm had simply washed the head of the famous writer ashore.
What would you do in his place? Let me know in the comments on Facebook 👇
