Skull

Mediana Stan
Mom pulls out a drawer to get a tube of hand-cream; in the cabinet, lit by the moonlight, the smiling skull of a white horse is shining between white porcelain trinkets; she can't believe her eyes, she turns on the light, she examines it. I laugh under the blanket. Where did you find this? On the bank of Dâmbu, I searched for grandfather's sword, you said he hid it there; I couldn't find it, I ran into a dead horse and I took its head. Just so you know it has all the teeth, I even cleaned them. I thought of grandfather's horse. Wearing his officer uniform, grandfather was smiling in the picture.

Vlad Pasencu
They came from the south. They were taller and stronger than we were. We lived peacefully on the same land for a while. Then the long winter came and they attacked us and drove us away from our territory. However, we had our bodies covered with fur and we knew the caves in which we could find shelter. This is one of their skulls, said the museographies showing us the exhibit behind the window. As you may notice, it's not very different from ours. They are Homo Sapiens, the ones who almost drove us to extinction.

Adina Drag
There was a rumor in the town that he was engaged in some wrong-side business. Nobody has seen his face recently, but even if somebody saw him, it would have been impossible to tell it was he. After he buried her alive in the shadow of a cypress tree, he was no longer himself. Because he couldn't live without her, because she was him. Therefore, they died together. Do you understand chronicler? There is nothing sensational here. The ripped skull went back to its worms, bored, while the chronicler ran away from the unseen world to the sightless one, right through the grass.

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