I need 200,000 euros urgently. Either I can hit the casino tonight or Switchblade will skin me. I got into trouble and borrowed money from him. Actually, it's my girlfriend Gina's fault. The girl's cultured, unlike me, she's not just graduated high school, she's got studies at Sorbonne. We met on Tinder. I wasn't expecting a match. Being so smart, we kept going to museums, and eventually, that's where the problem started. I knew she was jealous, but I didn't think she'd destroy a statue just because I said it had nice boobs.
Radu Gramatovici
It was after midnight when he got up from the table. He had lost all his money, but he felt nothing about it. There was only one other person in the slots area, a woman who was also getting ready to leave. I'll show you out, he asked almost indifferently. She looked up and nodded: it's safer that way. What do you think, she asked him in the street. About what? Who killed the eight women? Some lunatic, he replied, as they walked through the dark alleyway toward the boulevard. 9, the papers' headline would say the next day.
George Dometi
Little boy Li waited for his father. He diligently collected all his building blocks, all his modelling clay boxes, all the scraps of paper from the decoupage, putting them in order. When he came they would build a castle out of colored wooden cubes and launch hot wheels to knock them down. He didn't know that his father had been beaten to death by a bouncer outside the town's casino, where he had tried to defend a gambling addict who had been duped by the owner. One punch and a curb.
(Translated by Corina-Alexandra Belu / 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.