Neither of them is giving up. Everything has to be split fairly. Anyway, he says - with half a book in one hand and a shard of a salad bowl in the other - there's no such thing as fair. It would be fair if you saw me going for another woman, he spat. Leave you for her, he goes on. He brings the green blanket that both of them like, cuts it and throws her one half of it. So this is it. Is there something else? They stare at each other for a moment and hasten towards the corner from where their small dog is watching them.
Cecilia Fofiu
The service tree grew old. This is Erzsi-neni, grandpa, then grandma, neighbours in life and under red leaves. I give them yellow flowers, having my thought flavoured by pancovele[1] with which the Hungarian woman used to give me over the fence. Grandma used to make a face and told me to come quickly into the house. Why would I take things from that woman, why am I so greedy? I light merry candles for the long love story that tangled their lives and I ask myself if that happy good-looking man has reconciled the two sides in the skies, because here, in the cemetery, his cross slowly started to go downhill. Is there quarrel in the graves too?
Siranuș Hakobian
Everyone says that marriage is like gambling, that I was lucky because I am a sweet boy. It's true, you kiss my hands in public, you pull the chair aside so I can sit and put the jacket over my shoulders when we go out. Only when we step over the threshold of our home, when no one can see us, does your other face of yours begin to show, when you tell me I'm ugly and that I'm a shame. Fuck off, I'll blacken your eye if I ever see you again, you'd tell me, and I patiently wait to go out again and for you to kiss my hands.
(Translated by Cristina-Andreea Dobre / 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.