I got my share of blue and freedom this year as well. I can return to my metropolis, which I call home, in which, without these annual escapes, I don't think I could live anymore. It squeezes you out of energy every day, you try to enchant it, you make your corner of greenery, where you can breathe a little more, listen to a chirping of birds, smell a flower, but no matter how many people you know are beyond the fence, you still feel alone The noise of the metropolis is only the preferred background of solitude.
Gheorghiță Mircea
Goguță got off the bed. By the light of the night light he watched the disaster with nausea. The pipe had backed up and overflowed, was shorting the cables. Damn diarrhoea, he said holding his nose. Without power, the AI diagnostic app crashed. I'm going to drown in shit, he panicked. The atmosphere became unbreathable. One by one, all the other districts of the metropolis fell. Awakened from their virtual lives, the metropolitans felt the real atmosphere after long years. Forced to think, they failed miserably. Goguță was far away. The new ID, Dorel.
Elia Ghinescu
The sky. That's all you have left. There is so quiet in your metropolis, father, and so unearthly order, that I hear all my thoughts; how they sit, obedient, each in its place, as if they were missing from there. In some places there is freshly turned earth, damp, smelling of wet roots, which they somehow understand to grow only upwards. There are new dead in the graveyard, father, and they all seem to know how to look at the same blue. No silence is so earth-shattering as the silence of the dead.
(Translated by Andreea Maria Liceanu / 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.