Dalia-Maria Jula is participating in the International Literary Creation Competition, 7th Edition, from Șimleu Silvaniei, Romania and is 15 years old. We thank her for her participation and wish her success.

The Trovant

The morning Anna took Valentin away began so ordinarily that, years later, Anaïs would come to distrust the ordinary. Her version of it, at least. She distrusted cereal boxes, children’s boots lined beside apartment doors, the weak spring sunlight that settled over New York rooftops as though the city had not spent centuries inventing new ways to exhaust its people down to shallow husks. Most of all she distrusted the memories themselves, because memory insisted on preserving the smallest details while refusing to give answers to her ruminations. There was one such memory that she now despised. How Valentin always wanted the baby blue marshmallow stars.

He sat at the kitchen table sorting cereal pieces into neat little piles while Anna watched him from across the room. The child had inherited his mother’s dark hair and her habit of speaking with his entire body, every sentence accompanied by gesticulations and dramatic expressions. He was explaining, with the gravity only a three-year-old could possess, that the blue stars belonged to lonely planets and the yellow stars belonged to crowded ones. Anna listened with her head tilted slightly to one side, studying him in the manner she studied everything that held her attention for longer than a few minutes. The look had once unsettled Änais, thanks to the stillness of her expression and eyes of an uncanny shade of blue. But eventually it became familiar. And familiarity was, perhaps, one of the greatest dangers a person could face.

She had known Anna since they were children, from the outskirts of Brașov in the years after the country had begun shedding the foul skin of communism. Their neighbourhood had ended up full of unfinished things. Half-built apartment blocks, half-repaired roads, half-remembered promises and talks. In photographs from that time the adults all seemed tired and the children feral with freedom. They disappeared for entire afternoons and returned only when the streetlights flickered on.

One of those afternoons, when they were twelve, Anaïs had found Anna behind her grandmother’s shed holding a dead chicken. The bird’s neck hung loose in her hand. She remembered asking what had happened and remembered the peculiar seriousness with which Anna had replied that she had killed it because it ate its own eggshells. The explanation made no sense then and made no sense now. What remained with her was not the dead animal but the expression on Anna’s face, which had not been cruel and had not been guilty. It had been empty and fulfilled, as if she’d done a duty nobody else managed to. So while looking back, Anaïs often felt that every disaster in her life announced itself in advance and that she had often mistaken the announcement for background noise.

Anna had always known things, not facts but events. She knew which teacher would fall down a staircase, which neighbour’s dog would die before winter, which boy would arrive at school with a broken arm. Sometimes she spoke openly, though only to Anaïs, and sometimes she merely smiled in that quiet, distant way of hers. Afterwards the thing would happen and she’d call it coincidence. Children accept coincidences more readily than adults. As they are accustomed to living in a world whose rules have not yet been fully explained.

The years carried them across an ocean. Anaïs became an actress and then became successful enough that strangers learned her face before learning her name. Anna appeared in New York scarcely two weeks after her arrival, offering no explanation whatsoever. She drifted between jobs and apartments with uncanny ease while Anaïs built a career from auditions, rejections, luck and occasional miracles. Somehow they remained together through all of it, bound by the sort of friendship that survives not because it is healthy but because neither person remembers how life looked before it existed.

When Daniel, whom Anaïs had trusted with her life and heart, left after learning of the pregnancy, it was Anna who remained. When Valentin was born, it was Anna who stayed awake through long nights carrying him through the apartment while Anaïs slept in exhausted fragments. Gratitude accumulated slowly. It layered itself over every unease, every strange remark, every moment that might otherwise have invited suspicion. By the time Valentin started to call her Annie, she belonged to their household as normally as the furniture.

That morning she offered to take him for a walk. Nothing about the offer seemed usual. Anaïs had an interview later that afternoon and pages of notes she still needed to review with her manager. So she kissed Valentin’s forehead, told him to behave himself and watched the two of them disappear down the hallway, Anna’s pale hand wrapped securely around his much smaller one. Only an hour later she realised the apartment had become too quiet.

The sensation arrived before any conscious thought. Parents develop strange instincts. They become sensitive to the absence of sounds that once irritated them. She checked the time, then checked it again. When the phone rang she answered immediately. At first, Anna spoke as though nothing was wrong, her voice carried that same measured calm it always had, a tone suggesting she occupied some private distance from the rest of humanity. Then, out of nowhere, she asked whether Anaïs was happy. The question landed strangely. Not because of its content but because of the seriousness behind it. She suddenly felt dread seeping into her.

As Anaïs hurried from the apartment she listened to Anna speak about love, identity and purpose with the detached fascination of a scientist discussing fragile materials. Beneath her words ran something else, something she would not identify until much later. There are nuances so foreign that we fail to recognise them even when they announce themselves directly. Only when she heard the station announcements in the background did panic finally take shape. By the time she reached the platform she was breathless and a small crowd had gathered around her on the street, people recognising the actress before recognising the woman. The absurdity of it would haunt her afterwards. While her world was ending, strangers had been asking for photographs.

She saw Anna immediately. She was standing near the edge of the platform with Valentin balanced comfortably against her hip. The child was pointing excitedly toward the approaching train. He loved machinery, he believed trains were alive with all of their odd metallic noises. And for one impossible second the scene appeared perfectly peaceful. Then Anna turned.

Their eyes met across the distance.

Years later, when reporters, therapists and police officers asked what she had seen in that final moment, Anaïs could never provide an answer that satisfied them. She could describe the station, the approaching train, the fluorescent lights, the crowd pressing around her. She could describe the exact shade of blue in Anna’s eyes. But what she could not describe was the expression. It resembled neither hatred nor love but an odd sort of recognition. As though, after a lifetime spent observing humanity from the outside, Anna had finally discovered something she had been searching for and found herself unable to bear the knowledge of it.

Then the train arrived, people screamed, Anaïs loudest of all.. The remainder existed only in fragments.

What stayed with her was not the violence itself but the terrible quiet that followed, the sensation that an entire life had ended without leaving behind a satisfactory explanation.

Perhaps that was why she later found herself thinking about trovants, those strange Romanian stones that seemed to move when nobody was watching. Children were told theories about them in geography class. Adults dismissed the theories, yet continued telling them. A rock would stand in one place one night, and by morning it went a few centimeters to the left, and eventually they’d fall off the cliff in the middle of the night, perhaps take an unfortunate soul with them.

Anna had been like that, so ordinary at first glance, so impossible upon reflection. A thing that entered her life unnoticed and altered its entire landscape before she understood it had ever been moving at all.