Odin, dva, tri is
one, two, three in Russian, grandpa? Yes, my little one. Tell me again how you've come to learn these words, purred the girl. By counting the birch trees and the squirrels with hazelnut eyes just like yours. The girl giggled and perched deeper in his arms. While she was dreaming of playing with the squirrels, he was recalling how, in a windowless warehouse, he was counting the passing days, and then subtracting them out of his own life. In a warehouse from Siberia, long ago, a young war prisoner dreamed of being a girl's grandfather.
(Translated by Diana-Maria Croitoru / 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.
