Blessed are the Merciful

David Brescan
Sometime towards the end of the \'90s on Epiphany Day, the priest and the church singer were walking around the village. They arrived in front of our gate. I don't know how it is that I was playing behind the gate. The priest: Let's go inside. The church singer: We should not, these people have no money. That day my brother and I built a snowman taller than the gate. Back then, it was still snowing in winter. Since then, I have only entered the church on my wedding day. Everyone was there, except the church singer who was running late. Father, I said, he can come too, we do have money this time. Sad short story.
 
 Florina Hegedüs
My ears are moving like a fairy's. The evening mist is moving as well, settling on passers-by. The dress is clinging to my body. I let my bag filled with today's heaviness slide off my shoulder onto the sidewalk as I walk towards him. He knows me. I know him. We are both content, quelling our aching desire for life. I bow to the smile with which he greets me and I say to myself: Lord you give me so much, in return for so little. His long fingers caress my heart until its beats swell the bellows of the accordion and I place the pence on the cobblestone. In the church of a late tango.

Titela Durnea
You address me as "Sir", understood? You would hear him and become small, so small that you wanted to enter the needle's eye and to run away on its thread into the world. He was a generous man. He gave generously to those who asked. He had a big heart and lips raised in a smile under the gaze of an eagle with banewort in its beak. His greatest pride was the showcase in the semi- basement, overflowing with trophies. Based on the saying the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, hundreds of ring and index fingers were displayed there, along with a few ears that had heard things that should never be heard. Food for his ego.

(Translated by Adina-Lorena Dulamă / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)