My Uncle

Corina Nina
This is the first Christmas without my parents. They both died in spring this year, in a car accident. Since then, mum's brother, uncle Geo, has been as much of a father and also a mother to me. It's just us. Some days, we start crying out of nothing. Uncle Geo says that is OK to cry every time you feel like doing it. For example, yesterday, we both cried out loud while we were decorating the Christmas tree. And then we laughed our asses off by remembering how his fake beard fell when my parents called him to be Santa Claus. When he's laughing, my uncle looks so much like my mum, I feel like she's still with us
 
 Francesca Dorobanțu
Ioana, Ioana, wake up cause this bastards are going to kill me, the bloody foes, hope they get any disease and die damn it! Come, come, they're killing me, god damned assholes and the bloody hell of their gods. He screamed, struggling to break away from the frozen stone of the well. My uncle, with bulging eyes and ripped skin. He couldn't see my mum trying to warm up his deformed head with a hot cloth from the stove, after the beating he received. They were Russians or the Germans, or maybe from the Security. He was bitterly lamenting that after years in the front line, he was punished for a haystack and a cow.

David Brescan
When I was a greenhorn, uncle Dan came back from Italy with a dog and two raffia bags full of money. He opened up a pub where everyone was drinking on debt, but my father used to say he's always been too much of the generous kind. After that, the grills came, the manele[1], a BMW and some deep trenches for the foundation of a storied house. I haven't seen uncle Dan since the night the Italians dressed in leather jackets came to the pub. My dad said with a frowning face, that he went back to Italy, with them. In that morning, the dog was howling next to the trenches now filled over night with concrete.

(Translated by Constantin Grigorescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)