TIME DOES NOT DIVIDE EVENLY. SOME INTERVALS ARE TRICKY.

NO MECHANICAL FAULT HAS BEEN FOUND.

Mornings were usually quiet. She liked waking very early and making coffee in her little red enamel pot. She had had it for so long that it seemed to have always been there in the kitchen. The enamel had chipped near the handle and a black crescent of metal showed through. Vasile had bought it the year they got married. At least she thought he had. Some mornings she remembered buying it herself in Brașov. Memory had become unreliable in small, unimportant ways since he died.

At six she drank the coffee at the kitchen table.

At six-twenty she fed the cat that wasn’t hers.

At six-thirty the cat left.

At seven she opened the door to Vasile’s workroom.

No one remembers exactly when Elena became a watchmaker.

This is already strange, because everyone in the village remembers when Vasile became one.

It was in the winter of 1987, according to Petru, although Leana insists it was the following spring. Marin claims to possess a watch repaired by Vasile in 1985, which would settle the question if the inscription on the back did not bear the date 1991.

Such discrepancies are common in matters concerning watches.

What is certain is that Vasile repaired them.

He repaired alarm clocks, pocket watches, cheap Russian wristwatches, a Swiss watch that belonged to the pharmacist’s father, and once, according to a story no one entirely believes, the clock in the church tower.

Whenever a watch stopped, they came to him. And they were always pleased when, two or three days later, Vasile handed it back across the table and said in his slow, gentle voice:

“It’s done. Works fine. There was nothing wrong with it.”

And invariably:

“You don’t owe me anything.”

People protested, and he waved them away. In the end, something from somebody’s garden always appeared on the porch: a basket of tomatoes, two bunches of onions, a pumpkin in the fall, a jar of jam. She would make him one of the sour soups he liked, using whatever happened to come their way, and everyone was happy.

Vasile had been dead for a year, and she still hadn’t managed to really go into the room with the watches. Now and then she had opened the door, just to look, perhaps to take something, but she always closed it again quickly.

Then, one morning in April, she carried her coffee there in the small red enamel pot.

Everything was still in the same place: the magnifying lenses, the tiny screwdrivers, the tweezers, the little boxes of gears, springs, and screws. And the watches, of course, the ones Vasile had begun collecting over the years. He found some at flea markets and others were given to him by people who no longer wanted them. Some he had repaired and they still worked. Others looked as though they had never worked at all.

At first, she went in only to tidy up. But every time, the hours passed and she was still there.

She turned the tools over in her hands, trying to remember what Vasile had used each one for. She opened watches and followed the tiny gears without understanding much. Sometimes she picked up one of the lenses, fitted it to her eye, and stared. Still, none of it made much sense.

Until one day she opened a watch and, for the first time, knew where to look.

Slowly, little by little, she learned how to take them apart and put them back together. Then she discovered which gear was supposed to touch which, and how very little force could already be too much. Eventually she learned how to clean a mechanism without hurting it, how to straighten a spring, how to recognize a worn tooth.

And, perhaps hardest of all, how not to rush into doing something simply because she could not immediately find the problem.

She learned to wait.

Vasile had once told her that people broke most things because they had no patience. She hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Now she was beginning to understand.

After a few months she no longer had to look twice to know whether a piece had fallen properly into place. Sometimes she could simply feel it under her fingers.

With time, she began to hear the watches differently too and realized that not all ticking sounded the same.

Some watches ticked in a hurry even when they kept perfect time, while others always sounded tired. Some had a round, peaceful ticktock. Others scratched at your ears even after you stopped them.

Vasile’s watch did not make any sound at all.

She left it where it was.

By June, the room with the watches had become part of her mornings. One day, after making coffee in the red enamel pot, she turned on the radio and found the station Vasile used to listen to, the one that played old Romanian romances.

She carried her coffee into the room and looked at the table where Vasile’s watch was still waiting. She pulled it closer, picked up the magnifying lens and started to investigate the mechanism.

A song she knew came over the radio and she began to hum.

The mechanism was immaculate. Nothing was broken. Nothing was missing. Every wheel meshed perfectly with the next. The spring held tension, the balance moved freely. Still, it wasn’t ticking. Or was it?

She put it back on the table, turned off the radio and listened.

There were five watches on the table and another seven clocks on the walls. They weren’t ticking together. That was normal. But she realized that every few minutes all stopped at the same instant and the silence lasted perhaps a second. Then they continued.

She listened for a while. It happened eleven times. She wrote the times down.

7:17.

7:26.

7:31.

7:37.

7:52.

8:01.

8:16.

8:28.

8:33.

8:44.

8:57.

There was no pattern she could see.

She decided it was best to stop now. She had to go to the grocery store anyhow and maybe visit Tina on the way back.

The next morning, she looked at the paper again.

There were twelve times written on it.

The last was:

9/19

She was certain she had not written it.

For a while she stood at the table with the paper in her hand. Then she looked at the clocks on the walls, at the watches scattered among the tools, at Vasile’s watch lying open on the table.

It was still silent.

She thought about crossing it out.

Instead, she made coffee.

At six-twenty she fed the cat that wasn’t hers.

At six-thirty the cat left.

At seven she opened the workroom.

She worked as usual.

A little after nine she found herself looking at the clock on the wall.

9:03.

She went back to the watch in her hands.

At 9:08 she looked again.

Then at 9:11.

This annoyed her.

She put down the tweezers.

“Ridiculous,” she said.

Still, she waited.

At 9:19 every clock in the room stopped.

Not gradually.

Together.

The silence was so complete that she could hear a truck changing gears somewhere on the road and, farther away, someone shaking a rug from an upstairs window.

Then, from the table came a single tick.

Vasile’s watch was still lying open in the corner of the table.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

She waited for the second hand to move.

It didn’t.

Outside, the truck she had heard earlier disappeared down the road. Someone closed a gate. A dog barked and another one answered, then a third dog answered that one, farther off, and then a fourth, and the sound kept going out across the village without arriving anywhere. A bicycle went by the house. Another passed behind it. Somewhere a woman called a child’s name twice and got no answer.

Vasile’s watch kept ticking, its hands motionless.

She looked at the wall clock.

9:19.

Then at the little alarm clock on the shelf.

9:19.

The coffee beside her had gone cold.

When she looked up again, the wall clock said 9:20.

The other clocks had started too. She had not heard them begin.

Next Tuesday morning she ran into Petru outside the grocery store. He was carrying milk, bread and a plastic bag of tomatoes.

He looked tired.

“You look terrible,” she said.

Petru sighed.

“I have to go all the way to Mocănești, and God knows when I’m supposed to find the time.”

“What happened?”

“My father’s watch broke. That old one, you know it. Means a lot to me. I heard there’s a good watchmaker in Mocănești.”

He sighed again.

“God rest your Vasile. I could really use him now. I barely have time to breathe, never mind going all the way to Mocănești and back, then making the trip again to pick the thing up. I just hope that fellow is half as good as Vasile was and can figure it out.”

She looked at him.

Petru was sixty-one years old.

As far as she knew, he had no job that required being anywhere at a particular hour. His children had moved away. His wife had been dead six years.

“What are you doing with all your time?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

This seemed to trouble him.

“Bring me the watch.”

Petru stared at her.

“I thought Vasile fixed watches.”

“Vasile is dead.”

“I know.”

It was too difficult to explain. In truth, she would not have known exactly what to explain. Perhaps Vasile had taught her, and she simply hadn’t known it. She had been beside him all those years, watching him bent over the table, listening to a watch before he opened it.

“Bring it,” was all she said.

Petru came that evening.

“I won’t make it to Mocănești before the end of the week anyway. Keep it a few days. If you figure it out, send word. You’d save me that whole trip. I’m so busy these days, the last thing I need is to waste time on the road.”

He left the watch on the table and went home.

It was an old watch, with a yellow face and a brown leather strap that had been replaced many times.

At dawn the next morning, she got to work.

Before opening the watch, she held it to her ear.

Nothing.

After a few moments, she put it down.

“Strange,” she said.

It didn’t seem broken.

She opened it carefully and began cleaning the little gears. After a while she realized she was humming.

She stopped, her mouth slightly open.

She had not sung in many years.

The song was one her grandmother had taught her. It was not a lullaby, not a song of sorrow, nor one for dancing and celebration. It was all of those things together without quite being any of them, a song that emptied your heart and filled it again and somehow left you clean.

She worked on the watch for several hours, slowly, with the song inside her.

She found nothing wrong.

After cleaning the mechanism, she put most of it together and went to make herself a coffee. She left the watch on the table, the face still open.

Petru will have to go to Mocănești after all, she thought. I don’t know what possessed me to think I could repair watches now.

When she came back, she put the face back on and wound the watch.

It began to tick.

She gave the watch back to Petru the next day.

“You fixed it!”

A broad smile spread over his surprised face.

“There was nothing to fix,” she said, a little embarrassed. “I cleaned it, that’s all. If it stops again, I’m afraid you’ll still have to go to Mocănești.”

A few days later, on her way back from the market, she saw Petru standing at the corner talking with some neighbors.

“Good day! The watch is working beautifully! I’m telling everyone about you!”

“Don’t. There’s no need. I told you, I didn’t even repair anything. I barely know what I’m doing. Don’t go sending people to me.”

Petru laughed.

But he did tell everyone about her.

A few weeks later, Leana appeared at her gate with a small watch on a gold-colored bracelet. Her son had bought it for her birthday.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with it. It runs fast. Keeps fooling me. I look at it and panic because I think I’m late again.”

“How fast?”

“I don’t know. Five minutes, ten. Maybe more. I don’t know anything anymore.”

She sat down with a sigh.

“My son keeps asking me to come to the city.”

“So why don’t you go?”

Leana began listing everything she had to do. The chickens, the garden, the beans that needed picking, the jars she had to put up for winter. She certainly didn’t have time to go to the city. Besides, she felt bad telling her son that the watch he had bought her no longer worked properly. Perhaps she had broken it somehow.

The watch was, indeed, running a little fast.

The watchmaker opened it, cleaned it, and adjusted the mechanism.

A fine rain fell outside that day, and she worked for a long time with the window open. She liked the smell of wet earth.

When she put the watch back together, she held it to her ear for a while.

The ticking was quiet, like the rain falling in the yard.

Leana came for it the next day.

“I managed to fix it. It keeps time now.”

“Thank God. The last thing I needed was a watch making things worse.”

A couple of weeks later, Leana’s house stayed locked for several days. The neighbors said she had taken the bus into the city to visit her son.

When Leana came back, she stopped by with a box of chocolates from town.

“I hadn’t been to see him since spring,” she said. “I kept saying I’d go when I finished everything.”

“And did you?”

Leana laughed.

“No. The beans are still unpicked and the jars still empty.”

She shrugged.

“And nobody died.”

After Leana, others began to come.

At first there was one every few weeks, then more and more often. A watch that ran slow, one that stopped at night, another that worked perfectly for several days and then suddenly began rushing ahead.

At first, they came because Petru or Leana had sent them, but slowly word spread that Vasile’s widow had started repairing watches.

She protested every time that she was no real watchmaker and that anyone with a serious problem would be better off going to Mocănești.

But people insisted she try first. If she couldn’t fix it, they would somehow find the time to get to Mocănești.

Slowly, she became less “Vasile’s widow” and more and more “the watchmaker.”

That was how Marin arrived at her gate.

He came into the yard in a hurry and, before even saying good morning, took the watch off his wrist.

“I heard you know what you’re doing.”

“Not really. People talk too much.”

“Maybe so. Still, have a look at it.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does it stop?”

“No.”

“Run slow?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Fast?”

Marin thought about it.

“No. Not that either.”

“Then why did you bring it?”

He stood there for a moment, thinking, then said quietly:

“Because there isn’t enough time in a day.”

“There’s as much as there ever was,” she said.

She laughed.

“I repair watches, Marin.”

“I know. But people say...”

“People should mind their own business.”

She took the watch anyway.

She opened it twice and found nothing wrong. She left it on the table until the next morning.

Some children were playing outside in the street. They ran around and shouted and laughed loudly.

The watchmaker worked with the window open.

When she put Marin’s watch back together, its tick was short and lively, almost as if it jumped.

She listened for a while.

“Strange,” she said quietly. “I could swear you sounded different yesterday.”

Marin came that evening.

“There was nothing wrong with it.”

“But you opened it?”

“Yes. Opened it, cleaned it.”

She handed it back.

“And now?”

“Still nothing wrong with it.”

A few weeks later she found Marin at the edge of the road with three children gathered around him. He was showing them how to make a whistle from a small branch, and they were watching every movement of his hands.

“Marin, don’t you have work to do?”

“I do.”

He scraped a little more bark from the branch and held it up to the light.

“But I’ll show them this first.”

She started to leave when she heard him call after her:

“You were right, you know! There was nothing wrong with the watch!”

All the way home, she thought about Marin.

She went directly into the room with the watches.

The paper from June was still there, with its eleven times and the twelfth she had not written. She looked at it for a while, then moved it aside.

Vasile’s watch was lying open in the corner of the table. She fitted the magnifying lens to her eye and examined it again.

The balance. The spring. The gears. Every tooth exactly where it should be.

Nothing.

She turned it over in her hands and looked at it once more.

Still nothing.

“There is nothing wrong with it,” she said.

The words sounded familiar.

Vasile had said them hundreds of times.

There was nothing wrong with it.

Elena looked at his watch for a long time.

Then she closed the case.

Perhaps he had simply been telling the truth.

The subway was more crowded than usual, but she still managed to find a seat next to the door.

She liked to sit and watch people. Most of them were looking at their phones. Some had headphones on and stared into the void. A few stared into the void without any phone or headphones visible. Even fewer were having a conversation.

She would choose a few and give them names. Then she would imagine where they were going, and why.

She didn’t like to imagine the obvious.

The woman in the business suit, for example, looked anxious and kept checking the time. She was probably going to a job interview, for a job she might or might not be qualified for. She named her Anna. Anna was very rich and loved ice cream. An ice-cream truck was waiting for her outside the next station. Anna would climb into it and drive slowly through a neighborhood where she knew the names of all the children living in all the apartments along the block.

Sometimes, in the evening, she wrote down the stories she liked best. The evening part was also when she chose the language. She knew several and rarely had a chance to use most of them, so she alternated. Some evenings she wrote in in French, others in Italian, and at least once every week she wrote in Romanian.

The stories changed slightly depending on the language. Some gave her more words to work with than others.

By nine every morning, she was at her desk at the Department of Unnamed Things.

The name was more interesting than the work. Most days she answered emails and corrected forms. But last week was better. She had two new cases: a space between two buildings that was too narrow to be called an alley and a staircase that ended above the pavement. Her job was to find a name for them. Once named, they could be entered into the system. That was considered a successful resolution.

Today they received a complaint about the patch of ground behind the General Hospital. It appears on every city map but has no official designation. People sit there, wait, smoke, cry. Too many of them cry, apparently.

She entered in the form: SERVICE COURTYARD

On her way back from work, she passed by the General Hospital Tucked behind the main building, the dumpsters stood in a row. A truck was parked next to a delivery door, and two men in blue overalls were unloading boxes.

After a simple dinner she turned on the TV, in time for the local news. An older couple is telling the story of their lives. “Right here, on this bench, we meet for the first time” the woman says. It looked somehow familiar. Or maybe it was the alley. A solitary bench on an alley with oak trees, somehow odd to find it there. You would expect benches in a park. Then she remembered. It was case she had few weeks ago, at the beginning of spring. A long stone structure in a narrow pedestrian lane. She named it BENCH.

She smiled as the report ended with the old couple standing beside it, looking at each other more than at the camera. Someone in the neighborhood had hung a small sign on the tree beside them: LOVERS’ BENCH.

The next day she met Claire for coffee.

They had known each other for years and had somehow kept speaking French together, even though Claire spoke perfectly good English. It had started as practice and then simply became the language in which they knew each other.

She told Claire about the news story.

« Il y avait ce couple, très vieux maintenant. Ils se sont rencontrés au même endroit il y a… je ne sais pas, quarante ans peut-être. »

« C’est mignon. »

« Oui. Et je connaissais l’endroit. J’avais eu le dossier au bureau. »

She tried to describe it.

« C’est dans une petite rue piétonne, avec des chênes. Et au milieu il y a une longue… »

She stopped.

She searched for the word and couldn’t find it. The word bench came in English, but she wasn’t speaking English.

She moved her hand horizontally over the table.

« Une sorte de muret en pierre. Assez bas. Les gens peuvent s’asseoir dessus, mais les enfants montent aussi dessus, les vélos sont souvent appuyés contre… »

Claire stirred her coffee.

« Un muret, alors. »

« Oui. Un muret. »

They ordered another coffee and started talking about something else.

The next few days brought easier cases, like the narrow strip of grass between a parking lot and a row of garages that she called GREEN BUFFER, or the wooden platform beside a bus stop. She named it BOARDING PLATFORM.

On Friday, the first case was about eleven minutes. Every afternoon, a factory stopped one production line while the morning crew left, and the evening crew arrived. The eleven minutes appeared on payroll reports, safety records, and production schedules, but each department called them something different. She named them: SHIFT TRANSITION.

The second one was from the History Museum. They sent photographs of a glass case containing objects that had been donated but didn’t fit in any collection. A brass key, a child’s shoe, three postcards and a broken compass. She thought about that one longer. STUDY COLLECTION, she finally typed.

For reasons she had never been able to explain, the Friday cases were usually the best ones.

That evening she turned on the TV while washing the dishes. The local news was already on. She was not really listening until she heard the name of the street. The one with the oaks and the lover’s bench. “They really like that romantic story, playing it twice in couple of weeks” she thought as she turned toward the TV.

The woman was speaking. “The little wall should be left alone” she said, “it doesn’t harm anyone and I’ve used it many times to rest”. The man beside her disagreed. The stones were cracked, skateboarders had chipped the edges, and the city should either repair it properly or remove it. They interrupted each other more than once. The reporter called it a neighborhood dispute that had been going on for years.

She dried her hands and came closer to the television. She knew those faces, the old woman and the old man. Only, she knew them as a couple, a loving couple - not as angry neighbors.

She stayed in front of the TV until the story ended.

… to be continued

Note: images are AI generated.

Part 1: Ceasornicara - by Notes from Elsewhere

I-a dat ceasul înapoi lui Petre a doua zi.

- L-ai reparat! Un zâmbet larg i s-a întins pe față.

- Nu era nimic de reparat, a răspuns ea, puțin încurcată. L-am curățat și atât. Dacă se oprește iar, din păcate tot va trebui să mergi la Mocănești.

Petru și-a pus ceasul la mână, l-a apropiat de ureche și a dat mulțumit din cap.

- Merge. Asta-i important.

Peste câteva zile, venind de la piață, l-a văzut la colțul străzii, stând de vorbă cu doi prieteni. Râdea, vesel și destins, cum nu-l mai văzuse de mult. Nici nu părea să se grăbească undeva.

Când a zărit-o, a ridicat mâna.

- Ziua bună! Ceasul merge de minune! Să știi că dau sfoară-n țară!

- Lasă, bade Petre, nu-i nevoie. Doar ți-am spus că nici n-am reparat nimic. Și nici nu prea știu ce fac, nu-mi trimite oamenii pe cap.

Petru a râs.

- Dacă nu știi ce faci, să tot nu știi așa!

Ea a dat din mână și și-a văzut de drum.

Dar Petru s-a ținut de cuvânt.

Peste câteva săptămâni, coana Leana a apărut la poartă cu un ceas mic, cu brățară aurie, pe care i-l cumpărase băiatul ei de ziua ei.

- Nu știu ce are, merge înainte. Tot timpul mă păcălește. Mă uit la el și mă sperii că iar am întârziat.

- Cât merge înainte?

- Nu știu. Cinci minute, zece. Poate mai mult. Nu mai știu nimic.

S-a așezat pe scaun, oftând.

- Mă tot cheamă băiatul la oraș.

- Păi de ce nu mergi?

A început să-i povestească câte avea de făcut. Găinile, grădina, fasolea care trebuia culeasă, niște borcane pe care trebuia să le pună pentru iarnă, o perdea de spălat, două drumuri până la primărie. Nu avea ea timp de mers la oraș. Și, pe deasupra, îi părea rău să-i spună băiatului că ceasul nu mai mergea cum trebuie. Doar el i-l cumpărase. Poate îl stricase ea cumva.

Ceasul mergea, într-adevăr, puțin înainte. Ceasornicara l-a desfăcut, l-a curățat și a potrivit mecanismul. Afară ploua mărunt în ziua aceea, iar ea a lucrat mult cu geamul deschis. Îi plăcea mirosul de pământ ud. Când l-a montat la loc, l-a ținut o vreme lângă ureche. Tic-tacul era liniștit, ca ploaia care cădea în curte.

Coana Leana a venit după el a doua zi.

- Am reușit să-l dreg, merge la timp, i-a spus ceasornicara.

- Slavă Domnului. Măcar de ceas să nu-mi mai fac griji.

După vreo două săptămâni, casa coanei Leana a stat încuiată câteva zile.

I-au spus vecinii, luase autobuzul și se dusese la oraș la băiatul ei.

Când s-a întors, a trecut pe la ceasornicară cu o cutie de ciocolată de la oraș.

- N-am mai fost la el din primăvară, a spus. Tot ziceam că mă duc când termin treaba.

- Și-ai terminat-o?

Coana Leana a râs.

- Nu. Fasolea a rămas neculeasă și perdeaua nespălată.

A ridicat din umeri.

- Și n-a murit nimeni.

După coana Leana au mai venit și alții. La început câte unul la câteva săptămâni, apoi tot mai des. Un ceas care rămânea în urmă, unul care se oprea noaptea, altul care mergea bine câteva zile și apoi o lua iar înainte.

La început au venit trimiși de Petre sau de coana Leana, dar, încet-încet, s-a răspândit vestea că văduva lui Vasile se apucase de reparat ceasuri.

Ea protesta de fiecare dată că nu era ceasornicară adevărată și că oamenii ar face mai bine să meargă la Mocănești dacă aveau ceva serios de reparat. Dar oamenii insistau să încerce ea mai întâi. Dacă nu se putea, și-or face cumva timp să ajungă și la Mocănești.

Încetul cu încetul, devenise tot mai puțin „văduva lui Vasile” și tot mai mult „ceasornicara”.

Așa a ajuns și Marin la poarta ei.

A intrat în curte cu pași repezi și, înainte să spună bună ziua, și-a scos ceasul de la mână.

- Am auzit că te pricepi.

- Vorbește lumea prea mult.

- Așa o fi, da’ totuși uită-te puțin la el.

- Ce are?

- Nu știu.

- Se oprește?

- Nu.

- Rămâne în urmă?

- Nu cred.

- Merge înainte?

Marin s-a gândit.

- Nici asta.

- Atunci de ce l-ai adus?

A stat puțin pe gânduri, după care a spus în șoaptă:

- Pentru că nu-mi ajunge ziua.

Ea a început să râdă.

- Eu repar ceasuri, Marine.

- Știu. Da’ lumea zice...

- Lumea ar face bine să-și vadă de treaba ei!

A luat totuși ceasul. L-a desfăcut de două ori și tot nimic n-a găsit. L-a lăsat pe masă până a doua zi.

Dimineața, niște copii se jucau pe uliță. Alergau după o minge și se certau de mama focului dacă fusese gol sau nu. Unul râdea atât de tare încât îi molipsea și pe ceilalți.

Ceasornicara a lucrat cu geamul deschis.

Când a pus ceasul la loc, tic-tacul îi era scurt și vioi, parcă sărea. L-a ascultat o vreme.

- Ciudat, și-a spus încet. Pot să jur că ieri suna altfel.

Marin a venit seara.

- N-avea nimic.

-Dar l-ai desfăcut?

- Da, l-am desfăcut, l-am curățat.

I l-a dat.

- Și acum?

- Tot nimic n-are.

Peste câteva săptămâni l-a găsit pe Marin pe marginea uliței, cu trei copii strânși în jurul lui. Le arăta cum se face un fluier dintr-o crenguță și copiii îl urmăreau cu ochii mari.

- Marine, da’ tu n-ai treabă?

- Ba am.

A mai cioplit puțin crenguța și a ridicat-o spre lumină.

- Da’ stai să le arăt cum se face.

A dat să plece, dar l-a auzit strigând în urma ei:

- Să știi că ai avut dreptate! Ceasul n-avea nimic!

Tot drumul spre casă s-a gândit la Marin și la ceasul lui care nu avusese nimic.

A doua zi dimineata si-a făcut o cafea în ibricul roșu și a dat drumul la radio. A cautat postul pe care îl asculta Vasile, cu romante vechi.

Și-a dus cafeaua în camera cu ceasuri.

Pe colțul mesei mai era încă unul dintre ceasurile lui Vasile, desfăcut, așa cum îl lăsase. Nu se atinsese niciodată de el. Nu știa dacă fusese stricat sau dacă Vasile pur și simplu nu mai apucase să-l termine.

L-a tras mai aproape.

A luat lupa, apoi penseta cea subțire și s-a uitat la mecanism. De la radio venea un cântec pe care îl știa si fără să-și dea seama, a început să fredoneze.

Notă: Povestea este scrisă în limba română. Dacă o citești în engleză, traducerea este generată automat de Substack și poate conține formulări neclare sau inexacte.

Diminețile erau de obicei liniștite. Îi plăcea să se trezească foarte devreme, și să-și fiarbă cafeaua în ibric. Avea un ibric roșu, probabil îl moștenise, i se părea că fusese dintotdeauna în bucătărie.

Dar ea nu fusese dintotdeauna ceasornicară. De meșteșugul ăsta se apucase abia după ce rămăsese văduvă.

Lui Vasile îi plăcuse să repare lucruri de când era tânăr. Radiouri, lămpi, râșnițe de cafea, chiar si câte un cuptor care nu mai voia să se încălzească, dar doar la bătrânețe se specializase în ceasuri.

- Când te-a lăsat vederea, te-ai apucat de ceasuri? râdeau vecinii.

Dar tot la el veneau când li se oprea vreun ceas și tot ei se bucurau când, după două-trei zile, Vasile li-l întindea peste masă și spunea cu vocea lui molcomă:

- E gata. Merge. N-a fost mare lucru.

Și, invariabil:

- Nu trebuie să-mi dai nimic.

Oamenii protestau, el dădea din mână. Până la urmă tot apărea pe prispă câte ceva din grădină: un coș cu roșii, niște ouă, două legături de ceapă, toamna câte un dovleac sau un borcan de zacuscă. Ea îi făcea câte o ciorbă acră, așa cum îi plăcea lui, din ce se nimerea să primească, și până la urmă toată lumea era mulțumită.

Vasile murise de un an și ea încă nu reușise să intre în camera cu ceasuri. Mai deschisese ușa din când în când, doar să se uite, poate să ia ceva, dar o închidea repede la loc. Acum se hotărâse, în sfârșit, să facă ordine. Rămăseseră după el toate lupele, șurubelnițele minuscule, pensetele, cutiuțele cu rotițe, arcuri și șuruburi. Și ceasurile, desigur, cele pe care Vasile începuse să le strângă de cativa ani. Le găsea prin târguri sau le primea de la oameni care nu mai aveau ce face cu ele. Unele le reparase si mergeau, altele păreau ca nu merseseră niciodată.

La început intrase doar ca să facă ordine, numai că, de fiecare dată, treceau orele si ea era tot acolo. Întorcea instrumentele pe toate părțile, încercând să-și amintească la ce le folosise Vasile. Deschidea câte un ceas și urmărea rotițele fără să înțeleagă mare lucru, chiar mai lua câte o lupă, o potrivea la ochi și se uita, dar de înțeles tot nu înțelegea. Până într-o zi când a desfăcut unul dintre ceasuri și, pentru prima dată, a știut unde trebuia să se uite.

Asa, încetul cu încetul, a învățat să le desfacă și să le pună la loc. Apoi a descoperit care rotiță trebuia să atingă alta și cât de puțină forță era, de fapt, prea multă. Pana la urma a învățat cum să curețe un mecanism fără să-l rănească, cum să îndrepte un arc, să recunoască un dinte tocit. Și, poate cel mai greu pentru ea, să nu se grăbească să facă ceva doar pentru că nu găsea imediat problema. A învățat sa aștepte.

Vasile îi spusese cândva că oamenii stricau cele mai multe lucruri fiindcă nu aveau răbdare. Nu-i dăduse prea mare atenție, dar acum începea să priceapă.

După câteva luni nu mai trebuia să se uite de două ori ca să știe dacă o piesă intrase cum trebuie. Uneori o simțea pur și simplu sub degete. Cu timpul, a început si să le audă altfel si a realiza ca nu toate tic-tacurile erau la fel. Unele ceasuri băteau grăbit, chiar dacă țineau timpul corect, în timp ce altele păreau mereu obosite. Unele aveau un tic-tac rotund și liniștit, altele te zgâriau la urechi chiar și când le opreai.

Ce lucru fără niciun folos, se gândea ea câteodată. Cine mai are nevoie de ceasornicari în ziua de azi? Toată lumea se uită la telefon.

Într-o zi s-a întâlnit cu badea Petru la colțul străzii. Au intrat în vorbă, ca de obicei.

- Da’ ce ești așa abătut? l-a întrebat ea.

Petru a oftat.

- Trebuie să mă duc până la Mocănești și nu știu când naiba să-mi fac timp.

- Da’ ce-ai pățit?

- Mi s-a stricat ceasul de la tata. Ăla vechi, îl știi. Țin mult la el. Am auzit că-i un ceasornicar bun în Mocănești.

Apoi a mai oftat o dată.

- Dumnezeu să-l odihnească pe Vasile al tău. Tare bine mi-ar fi prins acum. N-am timp nici să suflu, darămite să fac drumul până la Mocănești și înapoi și după aia încă o dată să mă duc să-l iau. Sper numai să fie omul ăla măcar pe sfert cât era Vasile și să-i dea de capăt.

- Păi, bade Petre, până găsești dumneata timp să ajungi la Mocănești, nu mi-l lași mie? Să văd ce pot să-i fac.

Petru s-a uitat lung la ea.

- Da’ ce, te-a învățat Vasile meșteșugul?

Era prea greu sa ii explice, si pana la urma nu ar fi știut exact se sa explice. Pana la urma poate că o învățase Vasile și ea nu știuse, doar a fost lângă el în toți anii în care a stat aplecat asupra mesei, ascultând un ceas înainte să-l deschidă.

- Adu-l, a spus doar.

Petru a venit spre seară.

- Până la sfârșitul săptămânii oricum nu ajung la Mocănești. Poți să-l ții câteva zile. Dacă-i dai de cap, trimite vorbă. Tare bine ar fi de m-ai scuti de drumul ăsta, că la cât sunt de ocupat, numai timp de pierdut pe drum nu am.

A lăsat ceasul pe masă și a plecat.

Era un ceas vechi, cu cadranul îngălbenit și cureaua maro schimbată de multe ori.

A doua zi in zorii zilei, s-a apucat de treaba. Înainte să-l deschidă, a dus ceasul la ureche. Nu se auzea nimic. După câteva clipe, l-a pus jos.

- Ciudat, a spus.

Nu i se părea stricat.

L-a desfăcut cu delicatețe și a început să curețe rotițele. La un moment dat și-a dat seama că fredona. S-a oprit cu gura ușor deschisă. Nu mai cântase de foarte mulți ani și rămase așa câteva clipe, mirată de amintirile care dădeau năvală.

Cânta un cântec pe care îl învățase de la bunica ei. Un cântec care nu era de leagăn, nu era de obidă, nici de dans sau de petrecere, era de toate la un loc fără să fie de niciunul, un cântec care îți golea inima și o umplea la loc și te lăsa curat.

A lucrat la ceas, încetișor, cu cântecul în ea, câteva ore. Nu găsise nimic stricat, așa că, după ce a terminat de curățat mecanismul, l-a montat la loc și s-a dus să-și mai facă o cafea. A lăsat ceasul pe masă, așa, cu cadranul încă desfăcut.

Badea Petre va trebui până la urmă să facă drumul la Mocănești, s-a gândit ea. Nu știu ce-a fost în capul meu de mi-am închipuit că pot repara ceasuri acum...

Când s-a întors, soarele ajunsese pe masă și o rază se prinsese chiar în mecanismul desfăcut. I s-a părut că dansa pe melodia bunicii.

A pus cadranul la loc. Raza dispăruse înăuntru și, pentru o clipă, s-a gândit prostește că poate rămăsese acolo și cântecul.

A tras rotița și tic-tacul a început să se audă.

Era unul vesel și săltăreț.

….va urma

Notă: Povestea este scrisă în limba română. Dacă o citești în engleză, traducerea este generată automat de Substack și poate conține formulări neclare sau inexacte.

The dream began on a Tuesday in March.

Every Tuesday night he dreamed exactly the same dream. At first, he hadn’t noticed. Perhaps the dream had begun a few weeks earlier and he had simply failed to remember it. He remembered very few dreams and, in general, paid them no attention. But on the morning he woke with the unmistakable feeling that he had been there before, he began paying attention. After that there were no exceptions. Every Tuesday night he dreamed the same dream.

He had been driving the same bus route for more than ten years. Every morning, before pulling out for his first run, he tapped the steering wheel twice with the palm of his left hand. It wasn’t superstition. He had done it on his very first day and had never given the gesture another thought.

He knew the route by heart. Every bend, every pothole, every traffic light that stayed red longer than it should. He knew the people, too. He knew who boarded the first bus before sunrise and who never appeared until midday. He knew who always got off two stops before the end of the line and who fell asleep almost every day in the last row.

He knew the house as well. An old house on a street lined with acacia trees, which he passed every morning. There were grapevines in the yard and, in summer, geraniums everywhere. He liked that house, although in all those years he had never seen anyone go in or come out.

In the dream he drove the same route.

Only there was one extra stop, directly in front of the house with the geraniums.

The bus always stopped there. The doors opened. The engine idled for a few moments. No one got on. No one got off. After a few seconds, the bus pulled away.

For the first few weeks, what occupied him was not so much the stop itself as the fact that the dream stubbornly insisted on keeping to the calendar. He mentioned it to a friend, but the conversation quickly drifted toward one of their usual subjects, and before long they were talking about Sunday’s football match, for which his friend had tickets.

He went to see a doctor, who simply shrugged.

“There’s nothing unusual about it. I’ll run a few tests anyway, just to be sure.”

The results came back perfectly normal.

He even considered visiting a fortune teller, but he was a grown man and couldn’t imagine himself doing such a thing.

After that, he stopped telling anyone about the dream.

One day, as he drove past the house, he noticed that a bench had appeared beside the road. Its position struck him as odd, so close to the traffic, and he assumed someone must have put it there by mistake. The following week a brand-new trash bin appeared beside the bench.

Only then did he realize it was Wednesday. And when he had first noticed the bench, that had been a Wednesday too.

A few weeks later, a passenger he had never seen before pressed the Stop button just as they reached the bench. Petre intended to continue to the next stop, but the man jumped to his feet and began shouting, agitated, that he wanted to get off there. So he pulled over.

He shouldn’t have stopped. It wasn’t a bus stop, and everyone knew it. But what could really happen if he lost a minute and let the man off?

Over the following weeks, a few more passengers pressed Stop as they reached the bench. Not many. And always on Wednesdays.

By June, the garden was full of geraniums and rose bushes.

Without ever meaning to, he had begun looking toward the house a few seconds before the bus reached it, as though the entire route existed only to bring him there.

Meanwhile, the Tuesday dreams continued without interruption, and nothing new happened in them until one morning he woke with an unusually vivid memory of the walnut tree beside the bench at the stop that existed only in his dream.

That day, as he drove down the street lined with acacias, he saw that someone had planted a sapling beside the bench.

“I think it’s a walnut tree,” he said, without realizing he had spoken aloud.

The woman waiting to get off at the new stop looked out the window as well.

“Strange. I never noticed it before.”

For the rest of the day, he wondered whether he had seen a sapling, or the beginning of the walnut tree from the dream.

By July, the stop had become, without anyone quite remembering when it had happened, one of the busiest on the route. At first only drivers who gave in to insistent passengers had stopped there. Then people had begun waiting there as though it had always been a stop. One morning the city installed an official sign, as though it were simply acknowledging something that had existed all along.

Acacia Street. Route 7.

A week later, she appeared in the dream for the first time.

She was coming out of the house with the geraniums. She wore a large straw hat, unusually red, and a loose white dress that almost reached the ground. Strands of gray hair escaped from beneath the brim, and from the way she walked he guessed she must have been around fifty.

She stepped out of the house and, as she passed the walnut tree, rested her hand against its trunk for a moment. Only then did she sit down on the bench beneath its shade. The bus stopped. She didn’t get on.

In the weeks that followed she was there in every Tuesday dream. The red hat never changed, but the dresses did. Sometimes she smiled and waved at him. Sometimes she sat perfectly still, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the road, as though she hadn’t even noticed the bus had stopped in front of her. She never got on.

Several times he went to bed determined that, if he saw her again, he would get off the bus and ask who she was and what she was doing there. But in the dream he could never do anything except what he had always done. He stopped. The doors opened. He waited a few seconds. Then he drove on.

On that morning at the end of summer, which was, of course, a Wednesday, he saw her before the bus turned the corner.

She was sitting on the bench, wearing the same red hat.

For a moment he wondered whether he might still be dreaming.

He pulled into the stop, and the woman stood up and climbed aboard through the front door. As she came closer and he saw her properly for the first time, he realized she was younger than she had seemed in the dream.

She paused for a moment, looking at him. Then she smiled and held out her hand. She wasn't holding a ticket, but a small white envelope.

“For you, Petre.”

That was all she said. Then she walked to the back of the bus and took a seat.

He didn’t open the envelope until that evening, after he got home.

Inside was a single sheet of paper. Just a few handwritten words.

“It’s time for a new dream.”

Field Note

REALITY LEARNS FROM DREAMS.

IT NEEDS TIME.

Grandmother had three drawers.

One for documents.

One for money.

And one for keys to houses that no longer existed.

The houses that no longer existed were very important, even more important than the houses people left behind when they moved somewhere else.

That didn’t happen very often in Ada’s grandparents’ village. It happened mostly in the city, where she lived with her parents.

In the city people moved from house to house, or from one apartment building to another, and they never seemed to care very much about the places they left behind. There was always something better: a larger apartment, an east-facing balcony, closer to downtown, closer to the forest so they could breathe some clean air instead of all the traffic fumes. Countless other reasons.

The important thing was that people moved because they wanted something better.

In Ada’s grandparents’ village it was different.

People didn’t move into other people’s houses just like that, for no particular reason, because a house wasn’t simply a temporary solution to a problem of space, light, or neighbors.

If they needed more space, they built another room. If they had money, they replaced the roof. If they had more money, they built a better cellar, a sturdier attic, or a larger house on their own land, and if things went well enough, they bought another piece of land from the neighbors. But they rarely left.

Leaving was regarded with a certain suspicion, as though you had abandoned a conversation halfway through.

Perhaps that was why Grandmother kept the keys.

Not all of them, of course. The keys to houses where people still lived were kept somewhere else and used every day, which made them rather uninteresting.

The drawer was for the keys left without doors, without locks, without thresholds, and without people coming home in the evening. Keys to houses that had been demolished, collapsed, or forgotten by relatives who had moved to the city and then farther away, to other cities where they probably had nicer balconies and cleaner air.

One had belonged to an aunt who had moved to Canada and sent Christmas cards every year, although after a while nobody was entirely sure whether she still remembered exactly where the house had been.

There was also a large, black, heavy key that Grandmother said had belonged to a house that had ceased to exist before she herself had been born.

“If the house doesn’t exist anymore, what’s the key for?” Ada asked one day.

Grandmother shrugged.

“It isn’t for anything.”

“Then why do you keep it?”

Grandmother didn’t answer. She looked at the key for a few seconds, turning it between her fingers, then put it back in the drawer.

That night Ada was awakened by a sound.

It wasn’t loud, but it had something precise and metallic about it, as though two objects had lightly touched somewhere in the house. She lay perfectly still, her eyes open in the darkness, trying to decide whether she had only dreamed it.

The sound came again.

This time it was quieter, almost hesitant.

Ada sat up a little in bed. She wanted to call out. She wasn’t exactly frightened, but she wasn’t entirely at ease either. She thought about Grandmother’s drawer, about those useless keys that opened nothing.

She stayed like that for a few seconds, holding her breath. Then the silence settled back into place.

Ada lay down again, telling herself that by morning everything would make sense.

The next morning, she found Grandmother in the kitchen. She was already sitting at the table, her hands folded.

Ada stopped in the doorway.

“I heard a noise last night,” she said.

“It happens sometimes,” Grandmother said.

“What happens?”

“The keys.”

She said it simply, without mystery, as though she were explaining why water boils or why rain falls.

“Why?”

Grandmother shrugged.

“I don’t know. Maybe when nobody remembers them anymore.”

Ada didn’t ask any more questions.

A few weeks later, one of the keys disappeared.

It was small and rusty, and Ada thought it was one of the ugliest and most insignificant ones in the drawer.

Grandmother emptied the drawer.

Then she emptied the wardrobe and put everything on the bed. She cleaned the whole room. She carried the rugs outside. She went into the next room. She emptied the wardrobe there too. Then she went into the third room. Finally, she went down to the cellar. There she began wiping every jar. She picked one up. Looked behind it. Put it back. Picked up the next one. Looked behind it. Put it back. Ada counted thirty-seven jars before she grew bored and wandered away.

That evening Grandmother invited two neighbors over. They sat beneath the walnut tree and talked for a long time, in low voices. Ada found something to play with nearby, and they let her stay, although they had sent Grandfather away to “mind his own business” when he came to ask what had happened.

They talked about the house whose key had disappeared during the night. About the blue gate. About the room that faced the sunrise. About the large tiled stove in the guest room, one of those made in Aiud by a famous stove builder. About the well, which had stood a little to the right of the house, some thirty paces away. They talked about the roof, about the tiles. Ada understood very little of what they were saying, but she listened as they rebuilt the house piece by piece, room by room.

“The cellar was very large,” Grandmother said. “Twice the size of ours.”

One of the neighbors was silent for a few seconds.

Then she said,

“It was old Dinu’s house.”

Grandmother nodded, satisfied.

That evening the key was back in the drawer, and nobody seemed surprised.

Years later, Ada was returning by train from her grandparents’ village.

The keys were in a cloth bag, tucked inside her suitcase. She wasn’t entirely sure why she had brought them.

She had inherited the three drawers and had spent almost the entire summer putting papers in order, airing out the rooms, and wiping the dust from things.

She had tried to decide what to do with the house. She told herself she could come at least during the summers, walk through the forest during the day, and write beneath the walnut tree in the evenings.

It had rained almost all day, and the carriage was nearly empty. At one of the stations an old man boarded the train and sat down in the seat beside her. They talked for a while. About the rain, about trains, about how much the villages had changed. Then they sat in silence for a while.

When the train reached his stop, the old man stood up, picked up his bag, and held out his hand.

“Dinu,” he said.

Ada watched him step off the train, his figure disappearing into the rain.

She reached for her bag. She could feel the keys inside, cold and heavy. Back in the village, she would have taken them out and counted them. One by one.

She remained like that for a few seconds.

Then she took her hand away from the bag.

She turned back to the window.

The rain was erasing the fields, the houses, the roads.

Field Note

ABSENCES HURT ONLY IF YOU GO LOOKING FOR THEM.

RESULTS VARY DEPENDING ON LOCATION.

This story is another possible interpretation of the door in Ada’s grandparent’s village (see The Door in the Wall - by Notes from Elsewhere)

The story starts the same:

But … this time Ada doesnt go asking around the village

The door was always closed and that, more than anything else, bothered Ada.

Not because there was anything remarkable on the other side. If she stood a few steps to the left, she could see perfectly well what was behind it: a field, some grass, a path leading toward the creek and, farther away, the first houses at the edge of the village.

And yet the door remained closed.

Every day during the summer she passed it several times. On the way to the well. On the way back from the store when her grandmother sent her to buy bread, yeast, or the small sour candies she pretended not to like. On the way to Tanti Tanta’s house carrying apples, eggs, jars, messages, and occasionally information that seemed far too complicated to trust to a child but was entrusted to her anyway.

Every time she passed the door she wondered what would happen if she opened it.

Not what was behind it, that was clear and visible, but what would happen. These seemed to Ada like two entirely different questions.

That summer she was reading Narnia, and the situation became considerably more complicated.

The fact that she could see a field behind the door no longer proved anything. Books had already established that wardrobes were unreliable, mirrors were suspicious, and ordinary-looking objects frequently concealed entire worlds. There was no reason a blue door in a village in Muntenia should behave more honestly than a wardrobe in England.

For several weeks she became convinced that the field was merely a disguise and the real world would reveal itself only after the door opened.

The difficulty was deciding which world she wanted to uncover.

She considered Narnia itself, it seemed like a promising outcome.

On the other hand, if she opened the door and found herself in the story of the Three Little Pigs, she would be deeply disappointed. The entire story irritated her. Everyone made poor decisions and the ending felt undeserved.

Some fairy tales suffered from similar problems. The handsome prince was rarely the most interesting person in the story and even Ileana Cosânzeana, despite possessing exceptionally beautiful hair, appeared to spend too much time waiting for other people to solve her problems.

Winnetou was more attractive. A Journey Around the World in Eighty Days also had potential. Narnia remained a strong candidate.

The summer passed. Then another one. Then another one. The door remained closed.

Ada continued thinking. She got more and more convinced that choosing the wrong story could have serious consequences. If the door opened into a world she did not like, she might be forced to stay there. Books were strangely vague on this subject.

She decided to wait until she was sure.

Years later she realized that she had never opened the door.

The door, meanwhile, appeared perfectly willing to wait.

Later she wrote down the explanation.

EVERY DOOR LEADS SOMEWHERE.

TECHNICALLY CORRECT.

THE DIFFICULT PART IS DECIDING WHICH STORY YOU ARE ENTERING.

EXPLANATION #43

YOU CAN TAKE A PLACE WITH YOU.

THE METHODOLOGY IS DISPUTED.

The first time she moved away, she took two jars with her.

One contained sour cherry jam.

The other contained soil.

The jam had been made by her mother from the sour cherries that grew in her grandfather’s garden. She never opened the jar. Years later it still stood on the blue shelf by the window, exactly where she had placed it when they finally moved into their own house, after so many rentals and so many changes of address that sometimes it took her a few seconds to remember which part of the city they had lived in during a particular year.

The house had a garden.

It also had a kitchen sink facing a window, something she had wanted for a long time, ever since seeing a woman washing dishes and looking outside in a film. The film was probably American, although she could no longer remember the title or any of the actors.

When she washed dishes, she could see the children playing in the yard.

If she turned her head slightly to the right, she could see the jar of sour cherries as well.

Every now and then she did exactly that.

The children outside. The cherries on the shelf.

The soil came from the Meadow, her favorite place since childhood. At first she went there with her grandmother, who would let her run through the grass until she was out of breath. Then they would sit in the sun with their eyes closed while her grandmother told stories. Later she began going there alone, carrying a book. Later still she went there with Ionel.

Ionel told stories too. At the time they seemed very different from her grandmother’s stories. Looking back, she was no longer sure they were.

The jar of soil traveled with her through all those rented apartments. It sat on shelves, in cupboards, inside cardboard boxes that were barely unpacked before the next move began.

On the day they moved into the house with the garden, she dug a hole behind the house and poured the soil into it.

Ionel planted a walnut tree.

The years passed. The tree grew.

One autumn they harvested their first walnuts. She placed them in a green basin and stood there for a while, looking at her hands stained dark by the husks.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Ionel asked.

“No.”

The second time she moved across seas and countries, she took three jars.

The first contained sour cherry jam made by her mother from the cherries in her grandfather’s orchard.

The second contained walnut jam she had made herself from the walnuts of their tree.

The third contained soil.

It came from the flower bed beside the walnut tree, where the children had played for years and where, from spring until late autumn, there was always a forgotten ball, a plastic shovel, or a toy soldier left behind after some important battle.

She packed it carefully in her carry-on bag.

At the airport, a security officer picked up the jar and examined it for a few seconds.

“What is this?”

“Soil.”

“Why?”

She thought for a moment.

“Just in case.”

The officer looked at her for a long time.

Then handed it back.

In the new country they rented again for the first couple of years, carrying the three jars from one home to another.

Eventually they settled in a small house at the edge of a forest. They no longer had the large garden they once had, but the woods began so close to the fence that they called them “our forest.”

The children left for homes of their own. One across seas and countries. The other across the street.

The three jars stood on a shelf in the kitchen.

Enough years passed that she sometimes had to look carefully to remember which jar held the cherries from her grandfather’s garden and which held the walnuts from their tree.

One day she realized she was no longer entirely sure where the soil had come from.

Beside the walnut tree?

The flower bed?

Had a little of the Meadow found its way in there as well?

She placed the jar back on the shelf.

A linden tree had appeared beside the fence.

She did not remember planting one.

“I can’t wait.” Thought the old lady. She wasn’t old, not really. She knew that, but that’s how she felt these days. A bit slower in the mornings, a little more tired at night. The heels don’t feel like they used to, music doesn’t quite attract as it once did.

She made an effort today. All day she’s been waiting for tonight. All week she’s been thinking about what to wear. Is this hairdo too old school? Is this blouse showing too much? She was waiting for a date. A date that wouldn’t show tonight, and she knew it, but she still waited in the corner.

“I can’t wait.”, thought the cat. Sleek and a bit more slim than was healthy. All he could think about was food. It’s been too long since he was picked up like tonight. He wondered if this strange person would feed him. She smelled faintly of a garden and something edible. A garden. That would be a nice place to rest tonight, after the long day hunting for food, the cat was tired. More hungry than tired at the moment, so he still made an effort to call this woman over and ask. “Are you going to feed me?”. The woman barely heard the cat, even though she was looking straight at him, she was not paying attention.

“I can’t wait.”, thought the moon. It has been looking down into this place and seen the comings and goings of everyone. Ever a watchful eye. Today the moon appeared a bit brighter. A bit more colorful . But the moon didn’t care for all of that. As a witness to Earth, the moon was both bored and excited. It couldn’t wait to see the Earth’s evolution as it made a revolution. And it couldn’t wait to see how the lady and the cat found each other. An old tale, unlikely friends, timid allies, sheltering each other. One from the elements, the other from loneliness. “I can’t wait to see them again tomorrow. I can’t wait to see them find happiness with each other.”

Mama mea are 77 de ani.

Astăzi s-a apucat să scrie poezii.

Îmi apar prin mesaje, de obicei fără explicații și însoțite de întrebări. Se spune „la masă” sau „pe masă”?

Prima a fost despre o omidă. Apoi a venit una despre un greiere. Se pare că îi place noua ocupație, iar poeziile continuă să apară.

Așa că m-am hotărât să le adun aici înainte să se piardă printre mesajele vechi.

Originalele sunt în limba română. Voi încerca să le traduc cât mai bine în engleză...

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My mother is 77.

Today she started writing poems.

They arrive by text message, usually without explanation and accompanied by questions. Should it be “la masă” or “pe masă”?

The first one was about a caterpillar. Then came a cricket. She seems to be enjoying herself, and the poems keep coming.

So I’ve decided to start collecting them here before they disappear into old text messages.

The originals are in Romanian. I’ll do my best to translate them into English…

Omida | The caterpillar

Romanian

Omida stă la soare,
Sătulă de splendoare,
Visează doar mâncare,
De fluturi habar n-are,
Și nici de insectare!

English

The caterpillar sits in the sun,
Thoroughly tired of beauty.
All it dreams about is food.
It knows nothing of butterflies,
And even less of insect spray.

Greierele însurat | The Married Cricket

Romanian

Un greiere mic și prost
Se fălea în iarba deasă
Cum că el s-a însurat
Și-a avut furnici la masă.

English

A foolish little cricket
Was bragging in the tall grass
That he'd gotten married
And even had ants at the wedding feast.

Floare albă de cireș | Under the Rug

Romanian

Floare albă de cireș,
Astăzi m-am uitat sub preș.
Un gândac și trei furnici
Credeau c-au venit la bâlci.

Le-am dat cu insecticid
Și-am plâns apoi un pic.

English

White cherry blossom.
Today I looked beneath the rug.
A beetle and three ants
Seemed convinced they’d arrived at a fair.

I sprayed them with insecticide.
Then cried a little.

Oda bastonului | Ode to a Walking Stick

Romanian

Am un baston de jucărie,
Are mâner, dar n-are măciulie,
Nu-i bun decât ca antemergător,
Mă duce de la pat, din dormitor,

Printre coclaurii din coridor
Până la masa din bucătărie,
Unde mai pot să-mi pun o farfurie
Și să visez la vocile ce-odată

Umpleau sufrageria, astăzi moartă.

English

I have a toy walking stick,
It has a handle,
But no grand head to speak of.
Its only purpose is to lead me
From my bed in the bedroom,
Across the wilderness of the hallway,
To the kitchen table,
Where I can still set down a plate
And dream of the voices
That once filled the living room,
Silent now.

Purcelul | The Piglet

Romanian

Când eram mai mititel,
Aveam grijă de-un purcel.
Era mic și drăgălaș,
I-am făcut un paltonaș

Ca să îi țină de cald
Când pe toamnă s-a lăsat.

Dar purcelul tot creștea,
Haina tot i se rupea.

Mă rugam frumos de el:

Nu mai crește, măi purcel,

Că dacă rămâi mai mic,
Treci Crăciunul pe nimic
Și-ai să mai trăiești un pic!

Credeți că m-a ascultat?

Zorii zilei de Ignat
M-au trezit c-un guițat.

Și-am știut că porcul meu
Va fi carne, cârnați, seu!

English

When I was just a little thing,
I looked after a piglet.

He was small and sweet,
so I made him a little coat

to keep him warm
when autumn came.

But the piglet kept growing,
and the coat kept tearing.

I would plead with him:

“Please don’t grow anymore,
little pig.

If you stay small,
Christmas might pass you by,
and you’ll get to live a little longer.”

Do you think he listened?

At dawn on Ignat’s Day,
a squeal woke me from sleep.

And I knew my piglet
would soon become
meat, sausages, and lard.

Diferență de viziuni | Difference of Opinion

Romanian

Pe platforma care leagă
două mari interstelare,
o omidă stă la soare
și gândește-n gura mare:

„Sunt și albă, sunt și grasă,
toți mă știu că sunt frumoasă.

Nu-nțeleg deloc de ce

azi niște pitecantropi

vor să mă extermineze.

Cică nu aduc folos,
că sunt doar un vierme gros.

English

On a bridge connecting
two great interstellar worlds,

a caterpillar sits in the sun
and thinks out loud:

“I’m fair and I’m plump,
and everyone knows I’m beautiful.

What I simply cannot understand
is why these pithecanthropes
want to exterminate me today.

They claim I’m no use at all,
that I’m nothing but
a fat old worm.

She blinked those pale blue eyes, like water lit over white rocks, and men leaned toward her almost instinctively. She had curly blonde hair, was thin and small, and looked like a fairy from old stories.

But she was not a fairy. She was a structural engineer and designed dams for thermal power plants.

At home she had one of those enormous drafting tables covered with white tracing paper, and across it she drew straight lines and angles so exact you got dizzy just by looking at them. Everything had to be precise. Water had to flow where it had been calculated to flow, pressure had to remain within exact limits.

“The important cracks never appear at the surface. They begin first in places nobody can see,” she used to say to anyone willing to listen, but especially to her mother.

They were living together, in an apartment with a large and sunny balcony. Every Sunday they baked plum pie. Every morning her mother watered the plants on the balcony and shouted after her to take an umbrella, even in summer. And she always pretended to be irritated, although the umbrella ended up in her bag every single time.

They lived like that for almost forty years.

Then her mother died. She did not cry at the funeral, she organized everything impeccably.

She cried only a few months later, in a supermarket, when she passed the shelf full of plum jam.

She bought a jar, but when she arrived home she saw it was already cracked. She had probably hit it against the concrete stairs of the apartment building while climbing too quickly, tears still on her face.

After that, straight lines began to exhaust her. In the mornings she would stand in front of the drafting table and watch how all those lines and angles she was supposed to draw with precision began to bend, slip into one another, slowly turning into spirals.

It was not a metallic or heavy sound, as she might have expected. If one can expect thermal plants to sing, of course. They vibrated more like the enormous organs inside cathedrals, with a sound so deep she did not exactly hear it, but she felt it climbing through the bones of her body.

In the dream she walked barefoot along the dam and felt the concrete beneath her feet vibrating together with the song. As the sound grew, the dams began to tremble. At first barely visibly. Then more and more violently, until they began to come apart slowly, seam by seam. Thin cracks appeared first, almost elegant. After that the concrete broke away in large heavy pieces that fell without sound, and the water that had been held there for years began to move in waves.

Dark, deep water filled with orange, red, and yellow flowers drifting slowly through the currents.

The thermal plants kept singing, and she took off her clothes and stepped into the water.

The last thing she remembered was the sensation of the water against her skin. It was warm and dense, almost velvety. Liquid honey, she thought, although the comparison made no sense.

She woke with a dry mouth and the image still floating in her mind: the black water, the flowers burning through the currents, and the sensation of honey against her skin. For a long time she lay there without turning on the light, trying to remember whether she had been afraid in the dream. She had not.

In the morning she went to work as usual. She took the 7:15 bus, bought a poppy seed pretzel from the corner shop, and climbed the three flights of stairs to her office. She drank coffee that was too hot from the metal mug she always kept on her desk. She unfolded the drafting plans.

At lunchtime she wrote her resignation on a sheet of lined paper torn from an old notebook.

The director asked her whether she was ill.

She said no.

Preview, chapter from the upcoming book “The Quiet of Breaking”

Romanian original, English version at the end

- În lumina asta de seară, îmi aduci aminte de ea.

- De cine?

- De Anna.

Găsisem adăpost pe acoperișul unei case înstărite din Constantinopol. Am fost norocos, nu a fost revendicat de nici o altă pisică. M-am simțit imediat ca acasă. Vînam noaptea șoareci și șobolani, dimineața slujitorii mă răsplăteau cu un bol de lapte . Jasmina, în special, mă plăcea și îmi pregătea un bol de smîntînă, de fiecare dată cînd era de serviciu la bucătărie.

Viața era perfectă. Lumea forfotea ziua prin casă, aparent încîntați ca nu erau rozătoare în camere sau în cămări. Mi se dusese vestea peste case că sînt un vînător feroce. Trebuia să fii complet tîmpit, ca rozător, să calci pragul casei Annei.

Însă totul s-a năruit cînd a apărut Niccolo. Anna l-a plăcut din prima clipă, însă eu n-am avut încredere în el deloc. Nu știu detalii despre ei, însă îmi aduc aminte de bulgării de foc care cădeau asupra caselor. A fost înfricoșător. Urletele de durere ale femeilor și ale copiilor, răcnetele soldaților care luptau. A durat multă vreme, soldații cu turban au învins. Anna a luptat din răsputeri, însă soldații cu turban au reușit sa răpună. Am auzit că Niccolo, cel pe care îl iubea, a sfîrșit la fel - furia lui Mehmet a fost mare. Nu a cruțat pe nimeni.

- Așa îmi aduc aminte de Anna. Constantinopol era în flăcări.

În pragul casei, flăcările mistuindu-i casa părintească, și ea, în armură de soldat, cu sabia în mînă, luptînd să apere ce era al ei.

- In this evening light, you remind me of her.
- Of whom?
- Of Anna.

I had found shelter on the roof of a wealthy house in Constantinople. I was lucky; no other cat claimed it. I immediately felt at home. I hunted mice and rats at night, and in the morning the servants rewarded me with a bowl of milk. Jasmina, in particular, liked me and a bowl of cream ready for me every time she was on duty in the kitchen.

Life was perfect. The house was lively during the day, and everybody was apparently delighted that there were no rodents in the rooms or pantries. Word had spread throughout the neighborhood that I was a fierce hunter. You’d have to be a complete idiot, as a rodent, to come across Anna’s house.

But everything fell apart when Niccolo showed up. Anna liked him from the very first moment, but I didn’t trust him at all. I don’t know the details, but I remember the fireballs falling on the houses. It was terrifying. The screams of pain from the women and children, the roars of the soldiers fighting. It went on for a long time; the soldiers with turbans won. Anna put up a strong fight, but the soldiers in turbans managed to take her down. I heard that Niccolo, the one she loved, met the same fate — Mehmet’s fury was great. He spared no one.

- That is how I remember Anna. Constantinople in flames.

Standing still on the entrance of her house, in full armor, while the flames were consuming her family home, sword in hand, fighting to defend what was hers

The lamp had been standing there longer than the town remembered.

Long enough to observe the bridge through storms, through wars, through winters so heavy the river disappeared beneath ice, and summers filled with music drifting from open windows. Long enough to witness the slow replacement of nearly every human face that crossed beneath it.

The moon remembered even more.

But unlike human beings, neither the lamp nor the moon insisted on remembering things the same way twice.

She was five years old and at the market with her mother. Across from their own cart, where they were selling ceramic pots and cups carefully painted by her mother, there was an old woman who sold animals crocheted from wool. They looked alive, as though at any moment they might jump down from the cart and begin running through the market between people’s legs and wooden tables. Rabbits with folded ears. Foxes with narrow faces. A small owl whose glass eyes reflected the morning light too sharply.

And the cat.

The cat had black wool fur and thin whiskers stitched carefully into its face. Its button eyes were darker than the others somehow, glossy, and from certain angles, they seemed to contain reflections.

Every market day that spring, the little girl had stopped in front of that cart to look at it.

And every week her mother said:
“When we sell the pottery, I will buy it for you.”

The market was nearly over now. Vendors were packing away crates and folding canvas covers over the remaining goods. The evening light had turned blue around the edges, and above the square the moon had already appeared. Near the center of the market, the old iron lamp had begun to glow.

Just as they were starting to pack, a customer came by. They sold the last two sets. The girl did not even wait for the customer to leave properly before running toward the old woman’s cart.

But behind her, her mother stopped her. “No. We need the money for shoes for your sister. Her old pair has a hole in the sole.”

The girl stopped halfway. For a second, she genuinely did not understand the words. She looked back at her mom, and then again at the old woman and the cat. The old woman behind the cart said nothing.

The girl walked the remaining distance slowly now until she stood beside the cat. Up close, its eyes looked even stranger. Not made of buttons after all, but something darker and reflective, like wet seeds.

She reached out and placed her hand on its head.

“No,” her mother said again. “Leave it there.”

And then something happened. Her heart began beating so fast it hurt. Something hot and heavy moving upward through her body.

The market sounds changed first. Voices became distant. Metal clinking somewhere slowed strangely. A pigeon crossing the square stopped midway.

The old woman looked at her carefully and the little girl understood suddenly that the universe was waiting to see whether she would accept this world or refuse it.

Behind her, her mother took one step forward, her voice growing louder.

Her fingers tightened around the wool cat.

And in that split second the world separated.

In the old one, the child removed her hand obediently and walked back toward the pottery cart carrying nothing.

But there was another one too.

And there, she took the cat.

From that moment on, things no longer remained entirely the same.

The lamp remembered that worlds rarely separated through grand events.
Usually it happened through smaller things.
A hand closing instead of opening.
Someone refusing to let go.
Someone continuing to call into the dark after everyone else had already accepted silence.

Sometimes the moon illuminated streets that did not entirely exist.

And now and then, beneath the lamp, those who refused loss too fiercely seemed able to cross between them.

A boy once lost his dog beside the river and searched for three days without finding it. By the fourth evening, everyone else had already accepted the loss. But beneath the bridge, under the lamp, the boy kept calling the dog’s name into the fog long after the town had gone to sleep. The lamp flickered once. The black cat looked at the woman. Somewhere in the darkness, paws struck wet stone, running fast toward him.

There was a young man who crossed the bridge every evening with the woman he loved until one autumn night she stopped beneath the lamp and told him she would not be leaving the town with him after all. The river moved black beneath them. Somewhere far away, a church bell rang once. The woman turned and began walking back toward the town. “No,” the young man said, with the desperate certainty of someone refusing to allow the world to become that version of itself. The lamp flickered once above them. Beside the lamp, the cat opened its eyes. Years later, watching his wife asleep beside him, the man would still sometimes remember that night and feel strangely certain it was not the tears in his eyes that made him glimpse, for a moment, another version of the bridge where the woman never turned back at all, but continued walking alone into the fog while his own world remained standing beneath the lamp, waiting for him.

Sometimes, very late at night, the lamp flickered long enough for the shadows beneath it to separate incorrectly again, as though a nearby universe had drifted too close.

The moon sees all versions of the woman at once.

The woman carrying the cat in her arms.

The cat alone beneath the bridge, staring upward with unblinking eyes.

The hat moving across the street without wind.

The lonely woman leaning over the dark water.

There is no cat.

No.

At the far end of the street now. Smaller somehow. Thinner.

The lamp flickers.

For a moment the shadows beneath it separate incorrectly.

Then settle again.

From the series Not Everyone Sees the Same Cat, based on Dave’s interpretation

Passersby are catching a glimpse of a woman holding a kitty… How strange, they think, for this elegant mysterious woman to waste her time with a vagabond cat… But the woman and the cat know what no one else does. They even look alike, a deceiving combination of grace and fragility, as both the woman and the kitty are powerful old souls.

Ignoring everyone, the woman and the kitty are looking into each other’s eyes with trust and delight, capturing each other’s thoughts instantly, before any words or any meow would break the silence of the blue night. Just a soft, content purr now and then, which seemed to make the moon itself glitter on a tune.

“Wise woman, you did good picking me up. Cause you see, I chose you… I came to you in this dark alley lit by the moon as a little kitty, but I am your soul’s mirror. Your soul itself drew me onto you, so we can grow together into eternity. Take me home with you, take care of me, so I can protect your energy and your house.”

What will the woman do, the moon is wondering.

by Mihaela Cosma

From the series Not Everyone Sees the Same Cat

It was winter, and we were doing homework in the kitchen.
The oven door was cracked open, not to bake, but to warm the room. The air smelled faintly of boiled potatoes. My fingers were stiff inside the gloves my mother had cut the fingertips off.

The candle on the table was the only light. Its flame bent every time the wind found a gap in the window frame. My mother sat across from me, marking papers, her head bowed so the shadows deepened in the hollows of her face.

My little sister was hunched over her exercise book, her legs swinging under the chair.
“When is the hot water coming back?” she asked.

“Saturday,” my mother said, without looking up from her papers. “Will wash your hair then”

“And we have to go queue tomorrow morning. I heard they will bring chicken.”

I added.

“Not too early,” my mother said. “They won’t unload before nine. Take a book with you.”

She finally glanced up from her marking. “Speaking of books… have you finished reading Baltagul?”

“It’s boring,” I muttered. “I want to read Logodnica locotenentului francez.” The French’s Lieutenant’s Woman. “Why do I have to read Baltagul?”

She set down her pen. “Because Baltagul is ours. It’s in our language, our mountains, our way of telling a story. You can’t understand the rest of the world if you don’t understand first where you’re standing. Vitoria Lipan walks into the snow for the truth, not for romance. That’s rarer, and harder.”

The candle flared once, stretching our shadows long across the wall until they leaned toward each other, almost touching. My sister noticed, her pencil paused mid-word.

The flame steadied again.

The smell arrived. Not from the candle, not from the potatoes, but sharp and sudden, almost sweet.
The air smelled of oranges.

Bright. Impossible.
The kind of smell that didn’t belong to rationing winters, but to memory, to thought.

My mother went on marking. My sister bent over her exercise book.

Some nights the power would return, and the TV would hum back to life. Two hours a day, one channel, if we were lucky.

But not tonight. Tonight there was only the quiet scrape of my pencil and the slow turn of the pages.

We kept working until the candle burned low, until the pencil lines blurred and the page grew heavy under my hand.

And still the air smelled of oranges. Bright, impossible, like thought itself lingering when everything else was gone.

Excerpt from The Doors Between Our Selves.

Căciula Năzdrăvană

Căciula

Pot să scriu și eu o poveste? Oricum, tot o scriu, cu voia sau fără voia voastră.

Nu există nicio „doamnă” în această poveste. Există doar o căciulă neagră, din blană de oaie bârsană, pe care un cioban moldovean a pierdut-o când tovarășii lui au vrut să-l omoare, pe undeva prin ținuturile de la Soare-Răsare, ca să-i fure oile „mândre și cornute”.

Căciula era năzdrăvană. Fusese făcută dintr-o oaie bârsană și avea viață proprie. Când era lună plină, se însuflețea fără veste, plutea prin văzduh și arunca spre pământ umbre ciudate care întruchipau visurile sau, după caz, coșmarurile tânărului ciobănaș nenuntit.

În nopțile cu lună plină, căciula năzdrăvană arunca spre pământ raze fermecate care întrupau o doamnă veșnic tânără și înșelătoare, aflată mereu în căutarea tânărului nenuntit.

Doamna e oarbă. Nu vede și nu poate alege drumul. O siluetă firavă, care pare că s-ar putea frânge la prima adiere de vânt sau topi la prima picătură de ploaie. O fragilitate înșelătoare. Cutreieră lumea de la începuturi, fără odihnă și fără să rătăcească drumul. Ajunge întotdeauna unde trebuie și trece mai departe: inflexibilă, neîndurătoare, fără mânie, fără ură, fără dragoste.

Feriți-vă. Dacă o zăriți noaptea, nu-i stați în cale. Ocoliți-o de departe. Farmecele ei sunt otrăvite.

Pisica

Pisica zăcea înfometată la marginea unui pod, pe un drum lăturalnic, într-o zonă puțin circulată, într-o țară unde nu era niciodată nici prea frig, nici prea cald.

În schimb, erau multe râuri și poduri, iarbă verde, drumuri de țară, poteci și zăvoaie. Și tot atât de multe șosele, căi ferate și tuneluri întunecate prin care nopțile păreau să se amestece cu zilele.

Pisica nu era chiar o pisică în toată regula. Era mai degrabă un pisoi slab, jigărit, amărât și înfometat, care nu-și mai amintea cum ajunsese acolo.

Își amintea doar vag mirosul plăcut al coșului în care călătorea alături de stăpâna lui, ca orice pisică respectabilă, într-un tren de mare viteză.

Ațipise.

Apoi, dintr-odată, se pomenise zburând prin aerul răcoros și aterizând în picioare, ca orice pisică respectabilă, pe o porțiune de pământ acoperită cu iarbă deasă.

Noroc mare: aproape că nu se lovise.

Dar și mare ghinion: coșulețul dispăruse. La fel și trenul. Și stăpâna lui.

Chiar dacă nu era încă o pisică adultă, observase că, în orice împrejurare, pisicile țin să fie curate. Așa că începu să se spele cu mare grijă.

Pe Pod

Chiar atunci, pe partea cealaltă a podului, se aprinse un felinar.

Pisoiul ridică urechile, dar nu se sperie. Pisicile nu se sperie chiar de orice.

Pe drum nu se vedea nimeni. Nici om, nici căruță, nici bicicletă, nici câine. Numai că, din când în când, parcă se auzea ceva, ca și cum ar fi trecut cineva foarte încet pe lângă apă.

Pisoiul se opri din spălat și se uită lung în întuneric.

Nu era nimic acolo.

Sau poate era.

Pisoiul își arcui spinarea și pufni puțin, mai mult din politețe decât de frică.

Pe urmă o văzu.

O căciulă uriasă, neagră și înaltă, din blană creață, care parcă mergea singură prin noapte.

Asta i se păru suspect.

Pisicile nu au încredere în lucrurile care par să meargă singure prin noapte.

Abia după aceea zări și silueta subțire de dedesubt.

Femeia mergea încet, fără să se uite nici în stânga, nici în dreapta, de parcă știa drumul fără să-l vadă.

Când ajunse la mijlocul podului, se opri.

Pisoiul încremeni.

Femeia întoarse încet capul exact spre el.

Pisoiul se uită și el la femeie.

Pe urmă se uită la căciulă și înțelese imediat două lucruri.

Mai întâi, că femeia nu vedea nimic.

Și al doilea, că respectiva căciulă era mult prea mare pentru o persoană atât de slabă.

….. va urma

The Enchanted Hat

The Hat

Can I write a story too?
I will write it anyway, whether you want me to or not.

There is no “lady” in this story. There is only a black hat made from the wool of a Bârsan mountain sheep, a hat once lost by a Moldavian shepherd somewhere in the Lands of the Rising Sun, after his companions tried to kill him and steal his “proud and horned” sheep.

The hat was enchanted. It had been made from the wool of a Bârsan mountain sheep and possessed a life of its own. Whenever the moon was full, it would awaken without warning, drift through the night air, and cast strange shadows upon the earth, shadows that took the shape of the young unmarried shepherd’s dreams or, depending on the night, his nightmares.

On nights of the full moon, the enchanted hat sent magical rays down to the earth that gave form to a lady forever young and forever deceitful, forever wandering in search of the unmarried shepherd.

The lady is blind. She cannot see and cannot choose her own road.

A frail figure, looking as though she might snap at the first gust of wind or melt beneath the first drop of rain. A deceptive fragility. She has wandered the world since the beginning of time, without rest and without ever losing her way. She always arrives where she must, then moves on again: inflexible, merciless, without anger, without hatred, without love.

Beware. If you see her at night, do not stand in her path. Stay well out of her way. Her charms are poisoned.

The Cat

The cat lay starving near the edge of a bridge, beside a small side road in a country where it was never too cold and never too hot.

There were, however, many rivers and bridges, green grass, country roads, narrow paths, and groves. And just as many highways, railways, and dark tunnels where nights seemed forever tangled together with days.

The cat was not yet a proper cat. It was more of a skinny, scruffy, miserable little kitten who could barely remember how it had ended up there.

It remembered only faintly the pleasant smell of the basket in which it had travelled beside its owner, like any respectable cat, aboard a high-speed train.

It had fallen asleep.

Then suddenly it found itself flying through the cool night air and landing neatly on its feet, like any respectable cat, upon a patch of thick grass.

A great stroke of luck: it was hardly hurt at all.

And a terrible stroke of bad luck: the basket had vanished. So had the train. And its owner along with it.

Even though it was not yet fully grown, the kitten had already noticed that cats prefer to remain clean under all circumstances. So it began washing itself with great care.

On the Bridge

Just then, a streetlamp lit up on the far side of the bridge.

The kitten raised its ears but did not panic. Cats do not panic over every little thing.

No one could be seen on the road. No person, no cart, no bicycle, no dog. And yet, every now and then, it sounded as though someone were moving very slowly beside the water.

The kitten stopped washing itself and stared into the darkness.

There was nothing there.

Or perhaps there was.

The kitten arched its back and let out a small puffing sound, more out of politeness than fear.

Then it saw her.

An enormous black hat, tall and covered in curly wool, seeming to move through the night entirely on its own.

Only afterwards did the kitten notice the thin figure beneath it.

The woman walked slowly, without looking left or right, as though she already knew the road without needing to see it.

When she reached the middle of the bridge, she stopped.

The kitten froze.

Slowly, the woman turned her head directly toward him.

The kitten understood two things immediately.

First, the woman could not see anything.

And second, the hat was much too large for someone so thin.

….. to be continued

by Daniela Bunduchi,

From the series Not Everyone Sees the Same Cat

She stands beneath the glowing red moon looking directly into the eyes of a black cat with a slight cheeky smile. The black cat stares back at her, almost as if it understands every little thing about her, even the secrets she has never spoken aloud. The word around them is silent, except for the tall, glowing lantern that casts a warm light across the cold might air.

She does not fear the darkness. In fact she embraces it, wrapped in her elegant black velvet cloak, calm and mysterious beneath the blue night sky. The cat curls its tail gently around her hand, as though it belongs there. Together, they seem less like strangers and more like old friends meeting once again beneath the crimson moon.

There is a magical stillness as they look into each other’s eyes, a quite understanding that words could not explain. For a moment, time itself seems to pause, leaving only the woman, the cat, and the soft lantern glow beside them.

by Petra Leetch

From the series Not Everyone Sees the Same Cat

“Let me look at you. You’ve been away for too long”

“I told you I will be back. Just got lost for a bit trying to figure the way back.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have left you to go to him. He can’t take care of shit. He can barely remember to feed himself let alone take care of a living being. Can’t believe I agreed to sharing you with him.”

“He is not that bad. He always keeps the heating on so the flat is warm for me. And he never cleans, so there were always crumbs and stuff all over the place so I have plenty of mice to eat.”

“You always had a soft spot for him. He is terrible. I can’t believe he lost you.”

“He is fun. He lets me sit on his coach, and I can eat at his table. Unlike someone else I know!”

“Oi, I care about you! And I bought you a coach just for you. And a bowl. And the megacatfood you like. ”

“I know …”

“And I gave you the cat electric warmer roll. While he puts you in a box to entertain his idiotic friends, calls it superposition and he loses you.”

“It was only once. He lost me only once.”

“Hrump. Once was enough.”

“And he did not really loose me. We were playing hide and seek really. I am just really good at hiding.”

“You are really good … THAT IS WHAT YOU CALL IT? It took me 90 years to find you! You went in a box, and I had to spend almost a century and over a trillion spells to find you in some God forgotten universe. And then another year just trying to show you how to get back home!”

“Sorry Suzie …”

“Never again Cat. No more going to play hide and seek with him. And you are never to leave my sight again. You are mine. Not his.”

“OK Suzie. I am your Cat. I am Suzie’s Cat.”

by Raluca Bunduchi

From the series Not Everyone Sees the Same Cat

Every evening, just before darkness settles over the small town, a woman dressed in black appears beneath the streetlamp that stands before the bridge with a cat as dark as her clothes balanced lightly in her palm. There are people who watch from their windows. They say she’d stand beneath the light, staring silently at the cat she holds in her hand before beginning to walk. No one knew anything about this mysterious woman. Not her name. Not where she came from. Nothing. Only that the cat she holds found her. No one ever dares to disturb the woman. She always appears right after the sun sets when the sky is black and the red moon shows itself and turns everything it gazes upon crimson. Children dare each other to follow her through the narrow blue streets as she walks, but they always turn back before the woman reaches the bridge. Something about the silence around her and the bridge felt unnatural. Even the stray dogs avoid the sound of her footsteps. Yet the cat she holds in her arms loves her completely. It had found her years ago on the night the sea swallowed the town’s lighthouse. Waves had crashed against the cliffs, bells rang wildly in the storm, and afterwards the cat appeared in-between the woman’s arms emerging together from the fog the storm had made. No one has ever heard the woman speak. Now she wanders the city each night searching for something only the cat seemed to understand. On this particular evening, the red moon hung unusually low above the rooftops, glowing like an ember in the turquoise sky. The cat suddenly stiffened in her hand, ears pointed toward the water beneath the bridge. The woman stopped beneath the lamp. The canal below them was perfectly still. Then came the music. Soft at first. A distant piano melody drifting upward from beneath the dark water. The woman’s breath caught. She knew that song. Slowly, she stepped closer to the railing while the cat watched the canal with unblinking eyes. Beneath the surface, faint golden lights flickered into existence one by one, forming the outlines of windows far below the water. An entire sunken city. And there, standing beneath the waves as though waiting for her, was a man in a long dark coat. He smiled sadly. The woman reached toward him without thinking. The cat dug its claws sharply into her sleeve. Suddenly the music stopped. The glowing city vanished. The canal became ordinary once more, black and empty beneath the lamp. For the first time ever, to the people watching from their windows, the woman spoke aloud. With a soft smile on her face, she whispered “Not yet”. The cat relaxed in her hand as the red moon glowed silently overhead, and together they continued walking through the quiet town, carrying all the things the world had lost but refused to forget.

by Zoe Leetch

From the series Not Everyone Sees the Same Cat

Under a heavy sky where the moon burned red, a witch emerged from the shadows, her long silhouette stretching beneath a flickering streetlamp. The quiet night seemed to hold its breath as she passed.

Out of the darkness, a small black cat crossed her path.

The witch stopped. A thought came instantly - bad omen. Old stories rose up like a wall.

The cat froze too, its body stiff, its eyes wide. To the cat, the witch looked just as dangerous, just as unknown.

For a long moment, they stood facing each other, each wrapped in their own fear, each certain of the other without truly knowing why. Then, almost at the same time, both looked away.

Time passed. The lamp buzzed softly. The red moon hung still above them.

After a while, the cat took a cautious step forward. Then another. The witch didn’t move, but something had softened.

That’s when the cat noticed—the witch was crying. Quiet, steady tears falling into the silence.

The cat hesitated, then slowly came closer. The witch did not pull away. Instead, she lowered a hand, unsure but open. The cat stayed.

Under the warm light of the streetlamp, they began to see each other clearly - not as shadows or old stories, but simply as they were. The witch gently held the cat, and the cat curled in peacefully. Together, they looked up at the red moon, which no longer felt like a warning, but something calm and beautiful.

And in that quiet moment, they both seemed to understand that fear often comes from the stories we carry and the distance we keep. When we pause and allow ourselves to truly see, what once felt strange or threatening can become familiar, even comforting. There is beauty in everything - the witch, the black cat, even the red moon - it only depends on how we choose to see it.

by Lorraine Stoker

From the series Not Everyone Sees the Same Cat