The masked people are coming

Oh, if only those masked people would come faster.
I sit on my stomach and feel the cold tiles soothing my pain and heartbeat. My soul is heavy, my body is weak, I wouldn't even be able to stand up. Where are the masked people? Are they still coming? Something tickles my throat, but I'm even afraid to scratch myself. Really, what if they aren't coming at all? Leaving me on a leash forever. Look, it's them. They came. I sit up. Yoohoo, I feel like wagging my tail. I even dropped a few drops of joy. It is not easy at all to be a dog given up for adoption during a pandemic.

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


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 Ficţiuni Reale.