Absence

Dana Popescu
Her life was a long string of green crossings, never red. When unfulfilled desires turned her night into a day, she turnedthe day into her night and lived other people's dreams. She walked through life like a shadow, spinning on a merry-go-round known only to herself, not knowing if she was alive or if what she saw in the mirror was the reflection of an illusion. Looking only at the ground, her world was turned upside down when, one evening, she accidentally glimpsed the stars. No one had told her that absence from life was the only absence that was without leave.
 
 Ionuț Morariu
He didn't even realize when he was left alone. The funerals came one after another for a while. Then it got quiet. To kill time, he went to funerals, but the living spoke a language he understood less and less. About then he realized that he was his own best interlocutor. After all, it is still better to talk to yourself about your own problems than about other people's. After all, when you talk about your own life, you're living it twice - and that's better than only once.

Andra Toropoc
I was the new teacher and I showed up in the city in the evening. The school was down a long street with flickering lights. A surly janitor took me to my room where I crashed out dreaming of my students. In the morning, nothing but a faded catalog awaited me. I put a candy bar on each bench and read their names. When they didn't show up, I went out to ask the janitor. He came with me into the empty classroom, and here curtains fluttered and wrappers were thrown. Where are the children? I clung to his opaque gaze, at the end of which there was a string of crosses with little lights.
 
(Translated by Adela Neacșu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)