One ticket to Alaska, please

He asked me where I was going when I disappear.
In the place where ice floes drips through my veins, in the realm where I leave myself to be pulled by Huskys, without wanting to know the destinations, I wrap myself in white, a lot of white, the colours disappears, the emotions freeze all, and my tears turn into icicles.
He insisted I tell him exactly where that place was. I told him it starts with the letter A.
The day that I disappeared again, he went to look for me in Alaska. I, with my knees to my chest, I was crouched in the woollen afghan.

(Translated by Mihaela Ţarida / 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.