Soap Bubbles

Dan Banu
There was so much noise outside, the cars were whizzing by, the people were shouting, the trams were honking. And his mother had told him to do his homework. So, he puckered his lips, and he blew his first bubble. A word that was wandering around the roof of his mouth escaped and got in it. Then he blew bubble after bubble, each with a word in it, splattering in the coloured air as if they were fish in a plastic bowl. Eventually, when he thought that he gathered enough bubbles, he let them rise to the sky. He wrote his first poem up there.
 
 Arthur Ianoși
In Shampooland, by the side of the pool, the annual beauty contest was held. Every long-necked shampoo bottle was proudly walking around with no cap on, showing off their scents. The short ones were tip-toeing, with their cap slightly unscrewed, hoping to get on the same level as the others. Only a worn-out soap was hiding behind a bottle of conditioner, plotting. When they were all aligned by the pool, he pushed them all in. We are soaps, act like one, he shouted while thousands of colourful bubbles were popping in the air.

Gabriela Rus
I was once gifted an hourglass, now it is only shards and scattered sand. The kitchen transformed into a battlefield. We keep in mind each other's wrong moves and bad words. Error after error cause wound after wound and our skin became a fortress. We only show ourselves to shoot another arrow if the other one got dangerously close. In a corner, a big-eyed child sees how the bad words we absent-mindedly say to one another turn into soap bubbles. We're just ashes now.

(Translated by Cristina-Paula Grosu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)