I went ahead. I was burning up inside. One in 10 people have this thing that only leads to misery. Guilt, grief, helplessness, anger. All of it is bubbling up in the voice that drives me to do it. I always thought I'd silence it. Or teach myself to live with it, because it wouldn't hurt me. Not me. I'm the one who adapts its thirst. So it wouldn't hurt me. Then I woke up and found I'd killed someone. Car accident. I wonder why God always takes the kids while the drunks get away with only scratches?
Gheorghiță Mircea
I'm running the 42.195 km marathon. I'm going to win, I'm going to win, I'm going to win. I know, it sounds weird to you, but it's a symptom of OCD, I can't fight it. It all started when I was leaving the house and the fear that I hadn't turned off the stove was getting to me. Always in front of the apartment building. I'd go back up the ten flights of stairs to check, ashamed of the neighbours I'd meet in the elevator. And again and again. The result, a great resistance to exercise. I'd win and toss away at the last minute, forever, the gas bottle I'd taken with me.
Carmen Tot
One morning he woke up in darkness. I'm surely not dead, he shuddered. Not now, when I have so little left to finish the house. He began to dig with his fingernails, madly, watching in his memories the image of the grass growing soft under the sun, the family, the babies growing up. After a day the road ends. After two, he found the path and looked: he had walked out beside the steps of a wooden house that had stood on the land that was, until yesterday, his. A family was laughing happily, babies were playing on the grass in the sun. The mouse was frightened out of his wits and jumped underground.
(Translated by Andreea Cristina Moise / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.