One King, One Queen

Cristian Nedelcu
A warm breeze caressed the delicate cherry shoots in the palace's summer garden. The sun reflected off the black stone tiles, casting shimmering beams into the freshly combed hair of the queen. She looked like an angel, just descended from the cloud where she had taken her beauty sleep. The young king drank in the sight of her. A horde of pawns, driven by mounted madmen, stormed into the courtyard. Two gunshots carved their echoes into the morning silence, and the white squares of the board were flooded with blood. Blue.
 
 Dorin Vasile
The feast was held somewhere around Snagov. Enigel was there, almost unchanged. She had come with her husband, the seamless pipe tycoon. He had even made it into Forbes. She ruled over the ladyfinger biscuit market. The game started late, when most of us were already tipsy from the plum jam. Something for adults-like swap your partner. I got paired with Enigel and, somehow, we won the grand prize. We have a mushroom king and a nightshade queen, someone announced. We laughed together, and in her eyes, a shadow slipped in, maybe regret, maybe just a ripple lost on the lake.
 
 Andra Toropoc
At the party, his family had humiliated him once again. They brought out a jester-shaped cake and told him that ever since he started working at the circus, he had been nothing more than a clown to them. That he was a huge disappointment for not being a genius like them, a fool who hadn't inherited their august intellect or their prestigious academic careers. They shouted that he had shamed them and the boy felt a scorching fire rise within him, grabbed the cake knife, and tore their crowns from their heads. They didn't even have blue blood, he later told the officers as they pinned him to the ground.

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