It seemed like the right place. It even had a wooden beam. All I needed was a long rope, a bit of soap and a chair. It was easy. The rope I got from a ropemaker. The soap from a soaper. The chair I got from a lisping nurse in a test collection centre. When the Germans came, all they found was a bag of rotting bones. I was standing in a lit corner and I told them, pleased with myself: See? You didn't catch me. They gassed the place and set it on fire as if I wasn't even there.
Adelaida Zamfira
Aunt Didina, please pull the car over, I'm sick. You're killing me. I swear I'll light a candle for you at church tomorrow. Countess, shut up. I won't pull over until you promise to break up with that animal. You left my nephew to be with that dirtbag? Shut up, I read about it. I'll stab that damn animal. Auntie, he's my teddy bear. I can't sleep without him. To hell with your insomnia. Haven't you heard of Imo vane? Do you need a stuffed animal or a man? I don't know, auntie. Please don't kill him.
Iulia Anastasia Roșca
She had curled under the chair again and covered her ears. She didn't want to be there, to hear their hisses and screams. I want my mom, she told herself and tried to remember what her mother looked like. Her childhood was black and white, so her mother showed up in her mind as a grey ghost, taking her by the hand and leading her away from her suffering. One rainy day she found a teddy bear in the mud. She washed it and, for the very first time in her five-year-old life, she saw a colour: blue. Now her mother's ghost is also blue.
(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.