He had returned from downtown and a big guy waiting for him outside the door smashed his head with a crowbar. He had been sent by Giani in order to recover the money he had invested in him. Before he lost consciousness, he pierced the dark-skinned big guy's jugular with a blade, which was now covered in blood and urine. He wanted to start the car, but he thought that if he managed to stay alive this time, he would become a monk. Hope dies last. It's a good thing the mysterious woman in the backseat stained his windshield with brains.
Ionuț Morariu
She would let in any man that passed through her sheets as if each had been the chosen one, the Romeo. Her hopes and their manliness would gain momentum, and become gigantic. But after each time playing the role of Juliette, the shower of reality would come. Her bedsheets and her affairs had become colder and colder. Some of them remembered they had wives. Children and debt. They would sometimes warm up the love soup, then everything would freeze and taste like the same old story. It's okay, she would tell herself. There are no eternal regrets. As my mother would say: Dum spiro, spero.
Răzvan Drăgoi
I almost loved you. I was old. I saw my body and mind become younger. Time was mine. I made it go backwards. I knew that the future determined my present, which was unfolding like a bouquet of paths. Only one of them was the correct one. The rest of them were illusions. The flesh's blooming dream was merging with you. The consciousness of my past and future selves told me not to. Because it was a trap. You were a mortal. And I was just a word that would begin to dream of you.
(Translated by Bianca-Andreea Rîmboacă / 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.