You have such a big heart, said the fainting woman as she helped her up. She had heard the same thing from the old beggar to whom she had offered a pretzel. Or when she had helped the sick neighbour carry the bags: Such a heart. Big? She knew that from her heart there remained a shard. Clean, shiny, but a small shard. Her heart had been broken into a thousand painful pieces, and in time, in order to heal, she had given them up. If you can do so much good in the world with a tiny shard of a heart, do you realize how much more is possible with a whole heart?
Augustin Bănică
I have thousands and thousands. So simple. Imagine you're looking at the sole of my foot and you actually see some sort of Milky Way. No cuts or wounds. There are scars because that's the only way we can grow. And you're looking at Augustine's heel which is the opposite of Achilles. How silly that sounds. And how far these soles have gone, from running through the gravel in front of the house, and the family looking whole and happy, to the realisation that they were like that, only in a photograph. I'm here, I got lucky. Better alive than in a photo.
Cristiana Cătălina Clucencu
He threw everything away. He even slapped above it all. I told him to shut up, my mom would wake up and hold it against me that I didn't give up on him when everyone else did. He talked nonsense, just like he'd taken me for his wife. I was the centre of his suffering. He'd failed as an artist and turned to me. Out of a curse for who we both could have become, we chose to kill each other. We didn't pick up the pieces that night. I left them resting so we could both step over them to remind ourselves that we were not alone.
(Translated by Anca Maria Florea / 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.