Ruined

Sanda Burță
Dad's story, the one about a house having a soul like a person, you know yeah, but you wouldn't get it, you've never built anything in your life, you moved into an apartment block, he'd tell me that every time I went to visit Mom. I was sick of hearing how when you build a house, you're a god molding life, and after Mom was gone, I stopped going to see him. I didn't miss him, or his soulful house. It's been years since he died, and only now am I coming back to the village. The gate creaks. I see the house. It must have died like this with its windows wide-eyed and the door left open.
 
 Bogdan Sebastian Burjan
Only the walls remained. Brick walls, cracked. The roof had collapsed onto the old floor. Echoes could still be heard. Of small, quick, barefoot steps from when she used to flee all the sea's storms. And other echoes of cold, heavy tears. Like lead. When they struck the creaking floor. The fireplace had long since gone cold. It stared silently at the pile of rubble. So many plans, ideas, and dreams extinguished. Events that never came to be. And memories that would never come again. He lit his last cigarette. Took a deep drag.
 
 Dorin Vasile
We worked at the baskets in the morning to meet our quota otherwise, they'd humiliate us at roll call. After lunch, we'd slip away between the rows, heading to the crumbling manor at the edge of the vineyard. Capsă told us it had once belonged to a nobleman, from the time of the uprising. One evening, after we found out that the collective farm chairman was stealing from our meat rations, Gogu came with a bottle of gasoline. He didn't say a word - just looked at each of us in turn. We soaked the cuttings and lit a stub of a cigarette. The flame spread like a dragon's breath. The next day, they sent us all home.

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