Florentina Ghițescu
Don't you want to sit in the front row, that is what my homeroom teacher used to ask me in ninth grade. He was our geography teacher and he had the nickname Fasconal[1] because he would say: if your head hurts, take a Fasconal. Life in the front row was different from life in the last row. Now I paid attention and did not have to do my homework anymore because I had time to do it during the lesson. I finished top of my class all throughout high school and I ended up becoming a doctor, but I wonder every now and then how life would have been like from the last row.
we're the idiots that won't grow old. We walk towards death unquestioningly, waving beautifully colored rags in the name of a piece of land that we all should have owned and where it would have been nice to breed in peace. We are still obliged to believe that borders differentiate us and give us the right to kill each other. We dig our own graves anonymously in the ground we will die for. Those who will be left are preparing to forget us, lying to themselves that we did not die in vain.
Ina Moldoveanu
In front of us a man fell unconscious. Those of us passing by turned our heads the other way. He's drunk for sure, or on drugs, or simply trying to draw attention to himself; he might be crazy or a hungry beggar. Unimportant. Since nobody stops, neither do I. On the other side, a kid carrying a backpack, a small bespectacled kid, runs toward the fallen man. He's trying to shout to the people on the sidelines to intervene, but everybody is in a hurry. He tries to resuscitate him. It seems that the man has moved.
(Translated by Alina-Alexandra Șovar / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.