If someone had told me I was going to fall in love with a florist, I would have said: Run to the shop and get me two cigarettes. She went, so she said. We met, we liked each other, we loved each other. Until she moved in with me. It was nice at first. Flowers in the window would be nice, she says. It was daytime and a pot. We didn't have to go to the Botanical Gardens to see her friends. They were coming to us. If only they had paid at the entrance. We have four hundred pots. I miss bachelorhood.
Alina Ilie
I don't understand the buzzing music you listen to, and I don't like it either. You wear clothes in two sizes plus. When I used to buy these, you said I was making fun of you. And you don't hear me anymore. That's what my mother used to call me. Now we listen to ABBA together. She looks excitedly at my children, who ask us to choose the songs for them. Then she tells me that the baggy clothes are back in fashion, that she had a cream overcoat, a little too baggy, and red, thick-soled sandals that she wore with flared jeans, which the mum always wondered about.
Monica David
Mommy, do you like BTS, is my 12-year-old kid picking on me, does my mind freeze for a second, is it time for STDs already? No mommy, those are a Kpop band, Koreans, ah what a relief, maybe you prefer amsr a friend calls me. Ams what? I'm surfing on the Internet, so I don't end up looking like a cat at a traffic light, girl, in my time, we listened to Enigma music and possibly whale song, not some little girl with a microphone in her hand brushing it with a powder brush. They would reinvent hot water and call it new times.
(Translated by Florina Șamata / 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.