It's morning. I get out of bed, wash up, drink my coffee on the hotel terrace and head to the park. For the past week I've been looking at the same trees and admiring the same flowers. Ever since, a man sitting on another bench, has been doing the same thing. One day he asked if he could sit next to me. Did you know these flowers fall without ever wilting? No, I didn't, I answered. Then he said he wanted to love me for the rest of his life. Too bad that life lasted only a month. When the last flower fell from the tree, I left Okinawa.
Mihaela Palaloga
Where is she, huh? I'll kill her with my bare hands. I told her to stay in school, get straight A's and behave. And what does she do? She goes visiting that jackass to the cooler[1]? The vein in Sakura's temples throbbed violently, and his wife, Lia, agonized. Their daughter, with the greenest green eyes, had fallen into the hands of a hooligan from the village. But I fell in love, Mom! Didn't you marry my father at 16? How could he tell her about her grandparents who disowned her when she left home with the gypsy camp? About the cherry blossom in the backyard that bloomed only in her memories?
[1] slang word for prison
Alex Caragian
He'd heard that you should live in the moment, capture the moment, and he took his word for it, so he froze the present still. Up until then, the present had been a blink of the eyelashes of the majestic bird, a clump of spores blown by a fungus wearied by the trudging. He feared lest tomorrow might come faster now that he had delayed the present, but surely yesterday would not return from afar. But yesterday was blowing its ashes, it had not entirely burnt itself out, and now that the present was near it was raining in flakes and petals that smouldered silently.
(Translated by Andreea Georgiana Bogdan / 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.