The Ogres' Swamp

Iulia Biro
From afar, it was Paradise. A land with an ever-green meadow, strewn with flowers, bordered on two sides by a small village, white walls with colourful roofs, and on another side by a river, wide enough to require a boat to cross it. Closer, you'd wonder why people only came by boat but never left, and if anyone had ever seen the edge of the meadow. When you smelled the stench and saw that the meadow was a swamp covered in duckweed, with old boots, scraps of clothing, and broken toys floating on it, you were already too close.
 
 Dan Banu
Hey, you fool, don't you understand that you can't get to America in your Dacia car? It's physically impossible-there's an ocean between us and them, 7,600 kilometres separating us. How can you say that a guy told you there's a shortcut through the Dacian tunnels and you'd get there by tonight? Do you even hear yourself? Sure enough, by evening, he called me from around Grădiștea, asking me to come pick him up because he'd driven his car into a swamp. And he wasn't the only one-there was a pile of cars, one on top of the other, with a crowd of idiots standing around, gazing into the distance toward the Statue of Liberty.
 
 Ana-Maria Butuza
In the darkness of the underground, the miners shattered the rock and loaded it into wagons under the light of carbide lamps. Clank, clank, the wagons emerged to the surface, creaking and rusted, heading to the flotation plant where they unloaded their burden of ore. But one day, the decanter dam gave way under the pressure of the slurry, which had built up like a curse of the mountain. It rushed downhill, drowning every trace of life. Within days, only the church spire of the village remained visible. In the mornings, the valley is shrouded in a thick mist. It's the soul of the dead, the elders say.

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