Shards Bring Luck

Cristina Daniela Dumitru-Pascal
She was born sick. An old woman told her she would be fine and gave her a handful of shards. You'll know when to use them. Everybody was avoiding her. It turned out she was suffering from truth. She couldn't tell lies. Since no one spoke to her, she wrote stories in the palm of her hand with which she covered her mouth when she wanted to say something. She was so lonely that even the echo got bored and ran away. When they started gossiping she threw the pieces of glass away. They got in her eyes. She cursed us, they screamed. We see only truth. Cry. Tears wash away. I'm off to find a human. At least one.
 
 Iulia Biro
The blue tiled triangle in the bottom right corner was his signature. Everyone will know that Felix worked there. Some of his aura of celebrity will rub off on the master of the house. He matched the shard, the last of the mosaic, to the fountain in the atrium. He straightened his back. Lately, he was feeling his years more and more as he tried to get up. Age drags you down, his father used to say. He took his agreed payment and set off for other places, with the last boat out of Pompei before everything turned to ash.
 
 Florina Hegedüs
The merriment of the street has stopped, the sky has fallen to the ground making us shards. Me you us, wandering eyes, we search for our pieces of body rushing after a hand, a heart, they don't fit, we toss them back disappointed and start again. There's an embarrassment in it all, we had to admit we had each other but didn't know each other. We caught a glimmer of hope when an ear and a mouth of the same body found each other. When the night came and left us without a shimmer, a homeless man picked us up and wrote the story of each shard. He's famous now.

(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)