Bucharest-Constanța, Inter-City, the train of the rich. The AC is not working. It can't hold, says the conductor. It's 40 degrees outside and 38 in the wagon. A lady is about to faint while, stretched out on the floor, a dog wheezes with its tongue out. We drink a lot of water. Makeshift fans move slowly in the rarefied air. Deformed images flash across my visual field. It's suffocating, I can barely breathe. It was a hard week: I buried my father, I took my mother to a nursing home, my wife left me. I can barely breathe.
Dana Popescu
The earth has called him, her grandfather would say when, from the steeple, cries of sorrow would rang. She had heard that for a long while without understanding it until the earth, or better said the sea, called her most beloved one, right on the day of her fifth birthday. Then the heat deserted her soul again, when the earth stole all that she had left, the child pretty as a picture, who had barely turned 18. Now she waits for the earth to answer her prayers and call her too. Nobody tells her, though, that the earth doesn't call those that are already dead.
David Brescan
The old man, having reached the top of the dune, dropped his walking stick and collapsed face-first into the hot sand. Someone dripped brackish water onto his lips from a goat-skin pouch, and after he vomited, they carried him into a tent where a fire of wild hemp burned. They fed him mushrooms and mead, and when he nearly choked from the sharp smoke, they brought him back out into the blazing heat. The crowd buzzed. Rabbi Moshe, which way? Show us the path. Leaning on his walking stick, Moshe pointed toward the pillar of fire burning in a corner of his mind, opened his eyes, and began to walk.
(Translated by Ioana Grințescu / 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.