New Times

Horațiu Dudău
Millions of people were watching the Moon. Only my father wasn't. He was looking at my mother for the first time. The module spun thirty times. Dad, a hundred. Never had the chancellery seemed so small. The crew is getting ready. They're all looking out the porthole, like Dad in Mom's eyes. They're choking. Math doesn't help him. Upstairs, Neil takes semi-automatic control. Then he takes a giant step for mankind. Dad, nervously, manages to say Miss iiii. Neil and Dad jump like a couple of kangaroos. One on the moon, one in the corridor.

Ana Maria Dobre-Nir
When he went out for a run that day, he never imagined that such a thing would happen. She was happily running along the river's edge, thinking of all the wonders that happen in this world, and she was smiling just as she slipped into the river. The almost freezing water took her breath away. It all happened so fast. And the darkness, it seemed too much to take over all at once. When he managed to pull himself to the surface, his heart was pounding. But he didn't recognize anything from that moment on. He felt that the shore was not a shore.
 
 Cristian Nedelcu
They had taken their crops, they had taken their animals from theiryard, they had taken their land. They were no longer proud and worthy landowners, now they called them class enemies. The village idlers who, until yesterday, had been hanging out in the pub, were now important personalities in the village. They looked at them with hatred when they met them in the village. Now the rules have changed, Pătru, said Lingușeneanu, spitting into the noisy alleyway between his rotten teeth. Now we're in power, people. Stop sucking our blood, you stinking kulaks.

(Translated by Andreea Iulia Udroiu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)