19.05.2021

The war is over. The woman told me that I've been sleeping for 20 years. We found you under that bridge at the edge of the city. Naked, with swollen lips and blind. I don't know who you are, nobody came looking for you. We kept you hidden. No prisoner was left alive. I recognize her voice like I'm in a dream, just like a child is able to recognize his mother right after he was born. Her smell is making my insides twist and I start screaming, breaking away from the silence that was holding me. The woman is revealing her breast and offers me as a drink the black milk for oblivion.

(Translated by Alma Teodora Miron / 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 April 2021, the group has 5.600 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, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

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

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