Maricica was working hard in her master's hall, with the mop and then the cloth and through the open doors of the library she could hear the lady complaining to her husband of chronic fatigue, stress and anxiety, telling him that she needs a sabbatical year. In her head, sabbatical, as the lady said, sounded like a miracle and she kept repeating it in her head. At night, when her husband called her to milk the cows, she kept puffing and with her hands on her hips she said: Ioane, I need you to be more savage. And Ion didn't need to hear that twice.
Ana Vlad
He took the suitcase with the stamped document, free for a year, pretending that he can't hear his toughts: should I leave it like this? What if he needs me? You realise what can happen? Yes, he learns to be on his own, to be responsible, not to always count on me. But he's so naïve, so defenceless, and he got down. He wanted to travel the world, how he never did, to be happy and free, how he was promised to be, then he saw him crossing the street wrong. He left the suitcase, spread his wings and run.
Mihaela Moisescu
Still desiring the proposal and seeing that it was still on hold, I realised that if I don't change something, it wouldn't come. We were distracted by our different lives, different hobbies, anyway we were quite different but there was something holding us together, that's what we thought. I gathered my entire life in a suitcase, working from home was helpful in that time, and I wrote him about my decision to travel the Country. After a year I got a sign from him. He got married. No. He didn't invite me to the wedding. Love is a multitude of factors. In our case, all added up to zero.
(Translated by Maria Cătălina Moisescu / 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.