The lady with the black cocktail hat enters the store. The salesman shows up immediately: how may we help you today? Fresh floral perfume, as usual? Something suitable for your mood? The woman nods to a memory. This is where they'd met, this is where she had allowed herself to be seduced. After only a few months, he'd started to humiliate her, to hit her, to try to make her submissive. Under the cocktail hat, the wounds are fresh. At home, the narcissist is in agony. The stiletto from the sheath on her wrist is red. The woman lifts up her eyes and, after a long pause, says: Do you have any incense perfume?
Ionuț Morariu
Water magnolias and ink magnolias, metaphors rarely blossomed in his pages. He earnestly worked in the garden of stories, day after day, but his crop was pitiful. As pitiful as his uneventful life had been. And sad above all. Just like a ripe apple was infested by worms, he was burdened by sickness and inability to conceive meaning and enchantment out of the dust and emptiness of a poor copyist's life. But every now and then, in the white desert before his eyes, spring came. And then he wrote as if he had lived: the garden sings.
Iulia Vîși
It's hard for me to talk to you when my hand is held by HER, and yours is held by HIM. When you asked how my marriage was all I could say was that SHE resembles you. Then we both smiled and listened to our chests. You didn't let me count all the times I exploded in you, out of anger or love. So I wouldn't forget your soul, I polished it out of ceramic and enamel. Purity. I thought about sending you flowers at work. Anonymously. You would recognize me from the petals. Same as those from the sheets in which we've never made love.
(Translated by Raluca Sălcianu / 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.