Make the World Look Like You

George Dometi
The child carries her bucket in one hand and the bouquet of lilies in the other. She arrives at the park. After tracing the shape of her body on the ground with a pink metal shovel, the little girl begins to dig furiously in the sand surrounded by a wooden crate. She finishes, leaving behind a hole and a mound of earth. She calls out to her friend. Are you burying me? Andreea, are you burying me? What do you mean? I mean I'm going into this deep hole and you're slowly, slowly, slowly throwing the sand back in. All over me. In the end, you put these flowers. Like at Grandma's last week.

Luchian Abel
 My grandfather told me on his deathbed when I was five. He's full of witty words, proverbs pour out of him like water out of an artesian, he won grandma's heart when he told her he'd take the moon down and put her in its place, being brighter. He's dreamy that he wants a world like me: playful, fragile, dwarfed, cat-loving. We'd get bored if we were all the same, I say we should love dogs too. I'm sad there are no animals here in Heaven, but when grandpa comes to me, I won't need anything else. I'm 5 years old and my whole life ahead of me.
 
 Carmen Tot
I'm small, she repeated, hiding in the dark, but I'm not a coward. She opened her eyes and rushed towards the dragons in her parents' bedroom: it's such a terrible, ugly world. She screamed so loud that they fell silent during the argument. I'm moving out, she concluded, as she had heard from her mother. Then she grabbed her backpack to leave, but found her drawing notebook inside, and that ruined her plan. She drew two crooked crows, an almost vertical river and a little girl made up of four lines, a circle and two tails. And above it, a dead sun.

(Translated by Florina Șamata / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)