Childhood in the city of academics was filled with Sunday vocabulary-expanding moments. They were a kind of free meditations, in which hundreds of participants mouthed extra words and expressions, to give birth to a source of words that I did not suspect existed. I wasn't going for football. I was there to study traditional expressions. It was enough for the referee to make a mistake and the Romanian language reached unimaginable heights of development. What I learned in the stadium is still useful to me.
Vero Anttheia Teodoru
my mother sent me to look for him. I would find him in the locker room with the boys, drinking and laughing happily for victory or swearing hatefully if they lost the match. I would appear out of nowhere through the thick smoke, they would freeze for a moment, look at me as an oddity daring to enter their sacred nest where they licked their wounds cursing or howled their victories loudly against their spiked boots. Father stood up confused, took my hand and gently told me: girls are not allowed here. I'll be there in two minutes. It was hours. I was falling asleep.
George Dometi
He stole chalk and acrylic from school and colored ping-pong balls that he shredded and wrapped in the tin of discarded cigarette packs to make smoke bombs. He went to the furniture factory and took the flexible plastic sticks and paper rolls used to protect the wood from the garbage containers. He set them on fire and threw them onto the field, then wrote messages of support on the sheets. In the end, he ran away from the gendarmes, at whom he threw stones and lighters from his backpack.
(Translated by Ioana Andreea Radu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.