It's time you learned the truth, Grandpa said theatrically. On Mars, cats pilot spaceships. Dogs come from Pluto, where they live in the cosmic cold and are friends with the rats from the Moon. Those rats have built a device that makes cheese out of thin air. They all land in our garden when the children are asleep, to dance under the stars until morning. But if a child stays awake and peeks out the window, they vanish. The little girl's nose disappeared beneath her blanket. The old raccoon picked up his cane and left the room.
Ina Moldoveanu
Come here to Mama, my beautiful orange. Are you giving the cats pâté again, Florica? It's full of chemicals and messes with their potency. No wonder they're not multiplying like they used to. They mate all day with our Prince-may Mama love him, the little Martian. Takes after his dad, that one. And you, you're red from drinking. You must've been a scraggly tomcat in a past life, and I an aristocratic cat. I have refined tastes, mind you-J&B, Săniuța vodka, even surgical spirit pulled through bread. That horoscope lady said they came from Mars. And how did they land? With those big basins we used to catch Bulgarians with.
Camil Popescu
It was love at first meow. She, a black beauty with green eyes and glossy fur, and he, an orange tomcat from the neighborhood. At first, he'd bring her a mouse each day, and they'd play with it before dinner. She taught him to meow in G major, while he showed her how to knock objects off the table. They made love in the month of Mars, slipping in, drenched and shivering from the cold, to the poet's attic who wrote about them: I hear the unborn cats meowing to the unborn humans, showing the passage of a cat through its nine lives.
(Translated by Larisa-Marta Mreană / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.