They both sat on the edge of the airlock, their foreheads propping up the sky speckled with incandescent freckles. Look, that's the North Star, he told her, most likely pointing at a passing airliner. How beautiful, she marveled. But those dark spots beside the brightest trail-what are they? Oh, those are the space cats lapping up the Milky Way and then purring eternity into being. Our teacher told us so, he said, kissing her on the left cheek. Just then, a star, escaped from some cosmic cat's whiskers, slowly, slowly hurried toward them.
Ana-Maria Butuza
Marek's reality was darkening, as if the world were slowly dissolving around him. From every shadowed corner, from every thread of silence, feline voices began to murmur, bodiless and stretched out like a schizophrenic echo. At night, the voices grew ever clearer, as if the universe were urging him to accept his destiny. He begged them to be quiet, to leave him in peace, but they claimed to be coming all the way from Mars, drawn by his music. They forced him to sit at the piano, and with each note he played, another cat slipped through the wide-open windows.
Horațiu Dudău
I step onto the porch but don't enter the house yet. I see an old chair and sit down, sighing like someone bracing to grow old. The yard, untended and silent, hurts. I feel like a traitor to time, guilty of letting it die pointlessly, so many times. So I reach up to the sun, take my grandparents' shadow, and pull down the last cat from Mars. From the moon, I summon the dog and let them all scold me. The scent of a warm stove drifts over me like forgiveness settling on my heavy shoulders. Only now do I feel free to grow old without guilt.
(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.