You're a flower, you're a lily, and you smell just like vanilla; and to prove that you're my dear, my name I will sign right here. This is what Jan had written in her high school yearbook and she couldn't sleep well for a few nights, haunted by his unexpected confession and his fiery looks. When he gave her his, she wrote in many colours: If you were a willow on the shore, I'd turn myself into a river in your shadow, and if you were a magnolia flower, in sunlight I would forever shower. She carefully wiped her glasses, spread a thick layer of anti-wrinkle cream on her face and laid next to Jan who was snoring already.
Cristian Nedelcu
Mrs. Magnolia Bud-Leaf, ex Fleur, signed herself up in a minor literature group. All was well. She was doing what she'd always wanted, she was writing. Sometimes about strong winds which blew away souls, other times about people paralyzed under suspicious circumstances, even about highly intelligent lawmen. She felt that everyone who would read her texts would be enchanted by her way of narrating perfectly ordinary stories, giving them a touch of extraordinary. In fact, no one read her stories.
Andra Toropoc
Come on, mom, we have to leave. She took one more look at the house and the garden with flowering trees. Her life. But they had convinced her to sell and move into a nursing home, because the village was empty, the grandchildren needed money and she needed care. She kept her forehead glued to the back window of the car, even when the purple mist of her sky couldn't be seen anymore. At the nursing home she planted the little branch she had taken with her. And she lived long enough to see it turn into a tree, and when she died they placed the tree's first flower on her heart.
(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.