If You're Reading This, You Have Been Chosen

Elia Ghinescu
Your first impulse is to rejoice. Don't. What's the point anymore? They know where you are. They've been watching you from the moment you touched this page, from the moment your eyes passed over the first word. Maybe you thought something you shouldn't have. Or maybe you just breathed wrong. Either way, don't stop reading. The air around you has changed, did you feel it? The clock is ticking, and their footsteps are already in the corridor. The door won't protect you. Nothing will. You were chosen - but not for glory, not for salvation, but for disappearance.
 
 Horațiu Dudău
[...] to understand that you will see today's sunset with different eyes. You will wipe away the day with all sorts of rags soaked in fears you read about in specialized magazines, always printed for others. You will stand straight, on your feet, in front of the glass door, looking at the green of the garden and you won't know if the grass outside still feels like bearing your steps. You will go out and you will think the flowers are crazy, that they bloomed too beautifully in this year folded and put away in mothballs so that others can remember you.
 
 Carmen Tot
Wherever we were and whatever we were doing, at that hour of the afternoon when the light began to fall gently over the village and our inner clock told us the moment had come, we would race towards the gate, nudging each other, my sister and I, we would yank the latch and shout, before seeing Dad coming: what did you bring us? He would hold up a stack of books tied with string, showing it to us, and we would start dividing the books, before knowing the titles or touching them: five are mine, I would shout. The rest are mine, my sister would shout.

 
(Translated by Eduard Mihai Uretu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)