There is a story by Edgar Allan Poe—A Descent into the Maelström—that has followed me longer than most of the images I have ever carried in my head. I read it in my twenties—at an age when one still has the impudence to imagine the future as something already decided. It was not…

I was nine years old when I first realised that what I was speaking wasn’t simply the Bulgarian language, but something stranger, labelled by the incomprehensible word dialect. I was visiting my cousins in the romantic little town of Kavarna (“romantic” means nothing more here…

“No,” said the Girl, and there was a familiar note in her voice. Painfully familiar. “No parking!” “Keep off the grass!” “Occupied!” “Oh, come on,” thought the Boy – who by now wasn’t really a boy anymore, but a short-cropped, greying little man. “It was ‘no’ the other day, too,…

Beyond the ruined Ghost Park, the Ghost Forest has changed once again.