Ionuț Morariu
Ask a hundred prisoners and you'll get 99 identical answers. They all ended up in the cooler by mistake. Theirs, someone else's, or the system's. But me, dear madam, I admit it with my hand on my heart. I'm guilty. I got married for love. And out of love, I ended it. Why? Routine set in. You know how deadly that can be. And I told myself: better to die by my own hand than be killed by boredom... Of course, I think differently now. I've done a lot of reading in the slammer. I even have a tattoo with a quote from the classics: Let's all of you die, or let's all of us live. You know it?
Francesca Dorobanțu
He flicked the cigarette butt away when he felt the sting of the ember. Frozen in place, with the cold air stuck in his lungs, he watched how the wind was carrying the remaining scrub, as if, in a late moral epiphany, he needed it to not end up in the grave. He leaned on the shovel's handle and studied the tilled earth. The boundary between the necropolis and the world. He noticed a clenched fist, about the size of his own knuckle. His neighbours, he knew for sure. How did I end up here? he wondered. Overnight, the world had split into roaches, bastards, and people - and he was not just a person, but a distinguished citizen.
Gheorghiță Mircea
I think I wanted to end up here. Not from the beginning. Childhood was beautiful. Hills and forests. I would have preferred to stay there, in childhood, but slowly, the outside world took hold of me, pulled me out, swallowed me up. I felt passions and desires, anxieties and struggles, truces and compromises, even cowardice. All done for them. Instead of creating a different world, I adapted to this one, though I never liked it. They left me too, along with their children. Now, I'm waiting for the nurses to leave, so I can run back to the hill, to the forest.
(Translated by Marian-Cătălin Niculăescu / 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.