Florina Hegedüs
When autumn approaches I open all the windows wide and leave them open all day and all night so that the four winds can blow inside. Let all the golden leaves come in. And we keep the party going with wine and music blasting, the neighbours like it. Who doesn't like to listen to rhapsodies? The house fills with the scent of peaches I crush underfoot in my dance of regret. Oh, I'm so late. And I'm laughing my head off. I want to forget you. Forget the ambrosia dripping from your lips. And the drawer you're in? I think I'll sell it.
Diana Andrasi Zarnoveanu
I've always had a complicated relationship with drawers: clutter, noise, ideological conflicts and troubled subconscious. Give me nails and apples, sandals and nail polish, give me glue for bracelets and expired puffs and I'll immediately put them in a home-made drawer in which the reveries of adolescence are at war with the wisdom of impotence. I never clean, throw anything away or make artistic figurines by sticking forks in mountains of peas. Dementia wanders barefoot through my drawers, searching for the frame of my baptism photograph.
Ionuț Morariu
He stumbled across it by accident. He was looking for cartridges left over from his last mission in Afghanistan when he spotted it in the back of the drawer. A photograph in which his younger self had been frozen. He'd forgotten he could smile so stupidly. He'd also forgotten he could laugh in the face of horror. But in the meantime he had learned all there is to learn about alcohol, painkillers, suffering. And that death by bullet is a gentle end for someone like him. Then where had this photo that weighed as heavily as a full magazine in his hand come from?
(Translated by Bogdan Nicola / 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.