Cheat Sheets

Silvia Ștefan
My man had such beautiful fingers. They were thin, long and straight. When he grabbed my hand in his, I felt it firm, strong. Even so, under his touch, the piano was softening by love; the keyboards were in agony waiting to be pressed. In the night he was exercising, by the moonlight and by morning he was gladly playing to me. Since he has been gone, I am trying to recompose our music. I glued on the keyboards pieces of paper with the names of the keys; I don't have an education. I've always played by the ear. Today I am studying a sonata, I am reviving a love through fingerprints. The moon is smiling.
 
 Dan Banu
He left the first one that was looking at him bewitched. It's three and a half kilograms, congratulations. Then he spread through the entire world pieces of himself, images that were shreds of glass reflecting throughout each and one of them. More and more, less and less, hundreds of thousands, people that he loved, that were once his friends or that he met once, built a HE that wasn't him anymore, thousands of reflections shaping a hole like the eyes of the nun. And the last one was shaped through the eyes of his children.

Mihaela Scânteie
I am insanely lazy. I don't like to study. All day long I would put on make-up, I would do my nails, I would smoke at the school court when I'm skipping class, I would flirt with all the boys, I would kiss some of them and I would cuddle with others. And so on. Only about school I don't think about. The baccalaureate exam doesn't scare me at all. Laziness is a good mentor for me. It teaches me to have cheat sheets in the mirror of my beauty bag, when I don't have a pencil box; in the case of my lipstick, under the adhesive strip of my stockings and my bra. You see, if it wasn't the laziness, I wouldn't have discovered so many hiding places.

(Translated by Maria-Ilinca Darie / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)