Stories to Be Read at the Train Station

Carmen-Ecaterina Ciobâcă
A thousand mouths locked in one single great kiss, a thousand looks united in one single tear, a thousand confessions melted into one single I love you, a thousand promises about coming back and a thousand moments of silence for not coming back, a thousand embraces like there was no tomorrow, a thousand caps pulled low on the forehead, a thousand backpacks carrying all that weight inside, a thousand painful unclenching's. Then, with a short whistle, the train went straight up in the sky. From the man of flesh I loved, only a story the size of a pea remained. You.
 
 Ana Maria Dobre-Nir
Sigyra boarded the sleeper train, exhausted. She fell asleep quickly, lulled by the sound of the wheels. When she woke up, the train stopped at a station with a wrought-iron roof, a clock on the wall and flickering gas lamps. She got off, disoriented, and, to her amazement, she could see Tyven holding hands with an unknown woman. Tyven smiled warmly at her the way you would smile at a stranger, which made her feel as if someone had pierced her heart. The woman beside him seemed to be his wife, and Sigyra felt lost. Before she could gather her thoughts, the train whistle blew again.

Arthur Ianoși
She was staring at her chipped nail polish and her hands, which were dry from the homemade soap. Almost twenty years spent here, in this room with walls full of old calendars and a ceiling where layers of shrivelled lime revealed the cracks produced by the vibration of the rails. Had she gathered every single minute a train had been delayed and mixed them all with her childhood dreams, her life would have been different, perhaps. It was only her daily routine that kept her going. The station had been long dead, the microphone had rusted too. Ladies and gentlemen, the local train.

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