Two minutes, that's all I missed. I left everything on the patio table and ran home. When I returned, the sheets in the stack next to the laptop had been blown across the yard by the wind, the grey cat was pawed on the laptop keyboard, and a leaf was floating in the coffee in the cup on the table, and a bug was choking, because I'd just set up my writing table in the shade, nicely under the big apple tree. As I gathered my leaves from the grass, the cat spilled my coffee, which spilled on the chair. My summer place is in the country, to say the least.
Sanda Burță
He slept in the parks, curled up on a red blanket, his head on the notebook he never left. One day, he stopped me and handed it to me. Take it, man, I know you want it, I'm going. They found him dead the next day. My name is Vigil, no r. I was born with white eyes, the woman who didn't want to be my mother told me, blind that is, but I could see, I saw her soul. It was a woman's. That's all. She left me at the prison gate, supposedly to raise my father. Hey, man, you reading now, you ready for me to see your soul?
Fabiola Stoi
When he zipped up, he saw, in the cool neon light, a frail, girlish body covered in fine tattoos. Each patch of skin told a story, like a lifetime of struggle laid out in chapters. Skulls overgrown with flowers, swollen seas swallowing the moon and giving birth to suns, wings clinging to rocks, waiting for flight. How sad and beautiful at the same time, thought the inspector and flipped through the autopsy file. A heart of light, clean as untouched snow, rose from the tabs and came out the open window.
(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.