One more and that is it. It's really going to be the lucky and last one. All bets on red. He didn't have much left on him anyway. It was his last chance to get back at least a part of the money with which he had promised to send her to study in London. He closed his eyes and the noise around got louder. Out of all things, the uniform ticking of the roulette deafened him with each click. He was waiting for the announcement in the one realm that made sense to him, that of hope number 13. Black. Two daggers glided along his ears and chopped his heart.
Vlad Mușat
I felt her hot ribs and for a few seconds forgot who I was. Then, I stepped back and told her I couldn't. She looked at me with pity in her eyes. I lit a cigarette. I confided in her that the sunrise reminded me of the day my father died, because of a haemorrhage. She looked at me with even more pity, while she was putting her bra on. After several minutes, I realized she had left. I put on my jacket. I broke off a piece of fresh bread, in case I got hungry later.
Denisse Oana Rădoi
He was 43 and had less future than past. During his childhood, he wrote about love and was published in the High-Spirits Debut rubric. Why? There was nothing playful in the poems he was about to experience on his own. He felt old and inert. He had been left with no hope, nor imagination. He was humming a hip-hop chorus from the 2000s - and there is no way to explain how great I wanted to be and how small I am now. He realised that those who laughed a few years back had been right. So he hugged his own mediocrity tightly.
(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.