Pedals

Pompilian Tofilescu
The magic labyrinth where each one of you will make a wish come true. I pay for the ticket and enter. The room is empty, it has a door on the other side of the entrance and a pedal in the center. Next to the pedal, there is a sign, whoever presses the pedal will be lucky in love. I resist the temptation and I try the next room. Another pedal, another sign. Whoever presses the pedal will win the lottery. To little. Another room, another door, another pedal, another sign. And another. Finally, a pedal with no sign. What is it hiding? I press it. The last door opens widely. The street is empty, it's getting dark outside.
 
 Sanda Burță
They hardly got up from the table before he would ask them: Do you want to keep it or should we put the pedal to the metal? He already knew the answer, those women who didn't have the guts to do it on their own used to go to him. They called him doctor Pedal. Many of them didn't die, he had good hands. He was ready for any kind of crap, from sepsis to pris. Boys used to come to the hospital in the middle of the night, he could hear from a distance the sound of their iron tips rattling on the hall. He managed to get out of it every time. When he retired, he bought himself a cottage. Silence and a few beehives, he said to himself. They found him with a curette plunged into his neck. He had good hands.
 
 Monica Aldea
Pegasus opens the weather app. The air quality in Olympus, unhealthy. Since they had the fleet of monthly vehicles, a veil of thick fog was floating in the air. His left hoof was aching, and then there were the never-ending commissions: Juno had finished the youth balm, Medeea had asked for two young snakes for the hair, and he was supplying Zeus with his yogurt weekly. The horse-fly bit him ironically. Hey horse, you're getting in my way again. The air is not for both of us. The next day, with pedals from Hephaestus, Pegasus was inaugurating the Velocipede Era.

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