Because she was bored, as her husband Vasile was nearly always gone with his truck, Tincuţa made a habit calling over to her house three men from the village. She had given each one of them a code name with which they had the right to enter her home. When she was asking who was there, from behind the door she had to hear either Ching Cong, Cichi Ciang or Ciac Noris.
One day she heard the gate closing, took off her robe and asked the everlasting question.
Who the hell do you think, it's me, Vasile, who else, Cichi Cean?
(Translated by Diana-Maria Croitoru / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Professor James Brown)
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.
