Whoever says that office work is sedentary, is certainly no mouse. All day long I run on a 14 inch screen and do thousands of clicks left and right. I kept saying I wouldn't put my heart and soul into it, that it was just a job in the end. But when I feel his soft skin, long fingers and the perfume on his wrist, I melt. Last night he left a note for me, in a new folder, on the desktop. Resignation. By the time I searched on Google to see what that means, he closed the laptop. I woke up this morning sweating, held in a big hairy palm.
Carmen Tot
She had been working there for a lifetime, she knew every binder spine by heart: Patterns, Social, Love, Loneliness, Others. I'll die filing, she thought at the last second. Then there was another second when she stopped. She took off her shoes, poured the coffee in the toilet, then another moment when her mind drifted vaguely towards dreams, then another when she found an unused folder. With a black marker she wrote FUCK IT. She crossed that and wrote SORRY underneath, then she crossed that and wrote NEW. She lifted the cover and went out of everything she knew. God knows where.
Radu Gramatovici
Dan left and in his place came a thin man, with blond hair and a piercing gaze. The new folder was a visionary who knew all the secrets of the world. People have 7 lives, he told her while folding the letters she'd wrote. Every life is a new folding of the self towards itself. The more it halves itself, the more it finds its true self. OK, but why 7, she asked him one day, in love. Do you see this piece of paper, he replied. No man has ever managed to fold it more than 7 times.
(Translated by Ruxandra Adriana Dodoiu / 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.