Well, grandpa, remember when you took me to Santana? You held me for a couple of hours on your back so I could see the scene. Eventually, I took pity on you and climbed a ladder up a wall. When Santana's guitar caught fire, I started to shake and the ladder came off the wall. Everybody ran for their lives, only you jumped in to save me. Now you're lying helpless on this hospital bed. How I wish we could go to Santana again. I'm all grown up, Grandpa, I'm a head taller than you and I wish I could carry you.
Arthur Ianoși
I used to spend my nights trying to breathe, somewhere behind the Opera, in a filthy tower block, a mastodon that reeked of depression and dumpster juice, where the rats were doing better than the residents and you could read the irony in their whiskers when you walked in, tired from work, you realized the lift was just a non-functioning relic, put there to remind you that your chances of happiness disappeared the moment you resigned yourself and accepted your status as an unpaid servant.
Carmen-Ecaterina Ciobâcă
Maybe I don't even exist, he thought to himself, as the cold in the trenches and the blood mixed with mud didn't move him, but he felt the claw digging into his chest again and he woke up on that street in the city on the coast, reliving the afternoon he'd left for diapers, the smile of his wife with the baby at her breast, the Kalibr rain coming from the sea, the desolation afterwards, so he stopped in front of the heap of stones, then, like a hunted animal, climbed up the iron skeleton left standing and from there, from above, began to argue with the sky. Why, God, why?
(Translated by Alina-Dorina Nicolae / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.