Telephone Box

He told me to wait for him on the bench. He ran across the road, entered the booth with broken windows, dialled a number rotating the 10-holed disk, and then talked to someone for several quarters. He smiled, roared with laughter, felt sad, cried. Then, out of the blue, he started striking the receiver against the metal carcass, yelling like a madman: "I hate yoooou!". When he approached me, I asked him who he'd been talking to. "Nobody." The phone was broken. He had rehearsed a film scene in which he would never play.

(Translated by Alexandr Cotar / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Professor Nadina Vişan)


Real Fiction is a collective project started in 2013 by Florin Piersic Jr. The concept of Real Fiction continued to exist as a Facebook group, after a volume of stories was published at Humanitas Publishing House. (In January 2021, the group has 3.000 members.) The authors write ultra-short stories, with the texts limited to 500 characters (in Romanian, so the length of the English translation might be a little different) - a flash-fiction exercise on a topic that changes every few days. The group's coordinators are Florin Piersic Jr., Gabriel Molnar, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

*Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.