At the Market

Ana Ludușan
She told me how in her early youth, when she first became a schoolteacher, she bought herself a silk dress, red like the fresh blood, with her first paycheck. She strolled through the market in Năsaud, carrying a flower bouquet in her arms, hoping the villagers from Prundul Bârgăului would see how beautiful she was, how she had become a proper lady. But she didn't run into a single soul from her village. When she got home, her brother scolded her All those years of studying, and for what...you're selling flowers in the market just like the Gypsy women. She hid behind a haystack and cried her heart out.
 
 Adina Drag
The outstretched hand that begs gets a kick in the ass. That's how things go at our market. Hands have asses and the food has hands. Dozen of hands groping, searching for something they're missing. No one keeps their hands to themselves. Only their brains. Lots of brainless people pass by here. I'm not complaining, on my best days, I make 100 lei. I patched up my roof with it. But aunt Vica, working at the stall on the corner, is crying. She's always the first one to arrive. She sells tasty garlic. Marked with fingerprints, bargained for, by the brainless people. Aunt Vica is a beggar. Just like me.
 
 Ina Moldoveanu
She arrived at the market on closing time. Everyone was packing up their stalls, while she was wandering among them, smelling the scents, admiring the colours, taking in the bustle of life, right when people usually start haggling over the last tomatoes or oranges. Maybe some vendor in a rush would toss into the bruised products box a tomato, perhaps a potato or at least a radish she could taste, even just a bite. The noise of the market was life itself, abundance, and as the night settles, they would come, the silent ones, to feast on what others had thrown away. In the moonlight, a reddish apple winked at her. It was whole. It was waiting for her.

 
(Translated by Adina-Lorena Dulamă / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)