The Man We Need

Dan Banu
He stuck his head out the hole and looked around for a bit. Nothing. He pulled his head back in and sighed. Let us be patient, Wormy, cried his wife, overcome rather by her husband's sadness, than her own hopelessness. You're right, Worma, the right man shall come sooner or later, he smiled half-heartedly. We can't keep living here until this house collapses upon all of us, whined Vimi and Omi. Patience, kids, muttered Wormy, then he stuck his head out again and saw Ion, with the basket hanging on his arm, grabbing the ladder from behind the coop and leaning it onto the cherry tree. All their faces lit up.

Siranuș Hakobian
I was in my last year of highschool, when I got into the most group elitist there was. Like some grim eminences, as we found ourselves, we looked down with indifference upon all those around us and we knew exactly the way the world spins. I wrote poems, Ana was doing multiplications in her head, and Oana was reading Crime and Punishment. Like it so happens among the elites, it was not rare that we got into hair-pulling fights, from the need of an elitist hierarchy. The group only opened one time, when we accepted Mihai as one of us. He was, by no means, an elite, but he was exactly the man we all longed for: an admirer.

David Brescan
  He was supposed to be here at eight, to fix the hot water pipe. I called him at nine, and the line was engaged. Around ten, he texted me that he was on his way. Around eleven, he texted me again, asking for my adress. I sent it to him, a second time. He said he'd be here in an hour. An hour later he called me again to ask me what exactly it was that I needed done, so he could stop for the materials too on the way here, so that we wouldn't waste time. At two o'clock, I called him again, and he was stuck in traffic. At three, he texted me that if I didn't send him half the payment in advance on Revolut, I was clearly not an honest man, and that I should fix the pipe myself.  

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