Skull

Radu Gramatovici
He calls me: I found what you asked for. Is it from plastic? I asked. No. Authentic. Me - and it's from plastic. I interrupt him: Do you hear yourself? He replies: Do you think you can step into the character's shoes with a plastic one in your hand? I quiver, but he is right: I hate substitutes. In the evening, he enters the room in a rush and throws a bag on the table. I open it and I jump like a Jack-in-the-box. What the hell did you bring me? A skull, can't you see? This? This head could still talk yesterday So what? If I had de fleshed him myself, would it have been better? You would have had a ready-made skull. But I also brought you the acid container. To feel, man. The experience. Life.
 
 Monica Bologa
I'm on stage and I cannot rehearse my lines with this head in front of me. Every time I look at it, it sends a shiver down my spine. To feel more comfortable with this hideous prop, I decided to take it home for a little while. Because I couldn't look the skull in the eye, I put some glasses on it. I placed him on the armchair and started talking about this and that. Slowly we got closer. The premier was a success. After the show, I couldn't let it go, so I took it home. Now we are watching a movie together.

Lucian Pătru
I climbed into the left eye, crawled on my stomach through it, until I reached a catacomb full of my own doppelgängers, struck down by God knows what. I sat in a hammock, my legs swinging, and all I did was wait. For what? For whom? I didn't know yet. Out of boredom, I mostly tripped up the moments that were running wild. With my ears pricked up to hear the first living sound, which I would have swallowed immediately with the insatiable hunger of a curly pelican. I dozed off and dreamed that Scheherazade, after each story, died.

(Translated by Carmen Badea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)