The whole story was there, painstakingly written. The dead dog, the mother's grave, the guitar, the lost path, the first girlfriend, the second girlfriend, the waves she almost drowned in, a great love and two children, the found path. Patches of untouched skin are few, a sign that there is not much left to tell, though the man is still young. The last rose, next to the North Star on his forearm, is still fresh and aching: the newborn, the baby boy. Like a footnote to any manuscript, parallel scars frame the story.
Ana Vlad
It had been days since she had left her room. The locked door and the key left in the lock on the inside scared them. First they looked through the keyhole and saw that she was writing in a hurry, then they climbed a ladder to the corner of the window and up to the roof to look through the skylight. But the more they begged her to come out, the more she became indecisive and didn't answer. One day, fed up, they broke down the door. In the empty room, the heel fell with a small noise on the sheet of paper on which the words continued to flow.
Carmen-Ecaterina Ciobâcă
The moderator asked her to speak, her feet went numb, a vein twitched at her temple, then she saw the sunrise through the dirty window of the RER, the library swallowing her like a giant fish, the tomes opened with piety, the notes calligraphed on hundreds of pages, the first chapter she told him was an intellectual regression, the hopeless crying, the day she deleted, the long nights she relearned to write, so she uttered without hesitation, feeling a twinge in her belly: This book is my child.
(Translated by Victor Albei / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.