They say that if you step on that greenish stone, when the shadow of the cross falls on it, you will have reasons to be glad, until sunset. I hurried my ascent to catch the moment. I caught it, but gave up the traditional summit photo to get home in time. I made it. On the terrace there was a basket with a piece of jerky, a couple of eggs, half a bottle of liquorand a note: Enjoi your meel Uncle Grigore. Was it the first instalment on the loan I gave my neighbour seven years ago to buy a horse? Anyway, I was glad, because I was kind of hungry.
Iulia Biro
He remembers only a part of the day of the accident. He remembers how they all left, how the first part of the route posed no problem for them, only to stress about an abrupthill later. He can still feel the chain he was holding on to that path on the edge of a precipice, which just ended with a glade, when he saw something that made him forget where he was. He wasn't paying attention and that was it, by the time he woke up his legs were already amputated. The wonder of that time was now an obsession: how had a cow patty reached the top of that path?
Corina Nina
My father taught me to read before I went to school. Then he got me a library subscription to show me the world. And to excuse himself for not being able to send me to the camp in the mountains. He'd invested the money in the wine harvest, it had been a great year. He told me to look it up, there are writers who have described the mountain more beautifully than it really is. When I saw Mount Everest many years later, I realised I hadn't read enough. It was the most beautiful thing in my world as a child growing up among mountains of books.
(Translated by Florina Georgiana Țîncu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by prof dr. Nadina Vișan, Edited by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.