The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and Vagabond, Bulgaria's English Monthly, cooperate in order to enrich the English language with translations of contemporary Bulgarian writers. Every year we give you the chance to read the work of a dozen young and sometimes not-so-young Bulgarian writers that the EKF considers original, refreshing and valuable. Some of them have been translated in English for the first time. The EKF has decided to make the selection of authors' work and to ensure they get first-class English translation, and we at Vagabond are only too happy to get them published in a quality magazine. Enjoy our fiction pages.

This current issue presents texts by the 2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminars fellows: John Struloeff and Ivan Landzhev

John Struloeff is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Creative Writing at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. He is a fiction writer and poet, with work published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Literary Review, The Southern Review, PN Review, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere.

His awards include a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published a collection of poems, The Man I Was Supposed To Be, and his manuscript, Animals, was a finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. He lives with his wife, the novelist Cynthia Hand, and their two children in Thousand Oaks, CA.

Chapter 1

The engine shed in Yasenki was a low, gray building made of slatboard next to the rail line. A set of tracks emerged from beneath the door and angled onto the main set that led north. The door was slightly ajar. Several lines of footprints in the snow led across the tracks and to the doorway. Lev tied off his horse and followed the prints to the open doorway.

A police inspector and two men in business suits stood near a make-shift table in the center of the room, where a figure lay draped in a white sheet. Above their heads hung a lamp, burning brightly to illuminate their faces in the dark shed. Dark smears of blood stained the sheet from beneath. The form of the body beneath the sheet was misshapen, as if two women lay together.

A fourth man, a doctor named Andreev, was unloading utensils from his bag, laying them in a row beside the covered head. He had examined Lev on several occasions for minor ailments, although the two men did not know each other well.

Lev's shoe scuffed on the gravel, and all four men looked at him, startled.

"Count Tolstoy," the policeman said.

"I hope you are well today," Lev answered and stepped up next to him. "Gentlemen," he said to the others. They each bowed their heads slightly, but this was an unusual circumstance, and so they added nothing more.

Both of the two men in suits were holding notepads and pencils. Lev recognized one of the two as a journalist who occasionally worked in Tula. The other man appeared to be the doctor's assistant. Lev withdrew his own notebook from his pocket and marked the date: January 4, 1872.

The doctor gripped the top of the sheet.

"Ready," he said in a quiet voice.

He drew the sheet down to expose the woman's head and neck. The right side of her head was missing, severed in an almost clean line, leaving her nose intact. She was a young-looking woman with black hair and delicate features. Gray and purple tissues hung like a fringe where her cheek and eye were missing. Her hair was tousled and drawn around to the right, matted with her blood and the damp mix of brain matter and other tissues. A smooth, round span of blackened blood the size of a dinner plate lay next to her head. Her eyelid was partially open, exposing a green iris. Her skin was pale and translucent, a blue hue beneath her cheek.

"The woman has been identified as Anna Stepanova Pirogova," the doctor continued. He took a metal prong and inserted it into the exposed areas of the inner flesh of her face, touching sections of bone, examining cavities. Then he held her head gently with both hands and shifted it to the side to better examine the uninjured sections of her face and neck. "There appear to be no other injuries to her head and neck but the damage inflicted by the crushing force of the wheels."