I put a spell on you, this was constantly on the speaker and went on to the corners of his mind, long labyrinth halls. Pagliaccio, the circus puppet was humming from a trance: Because you're mine. He was preparing the enchanted wood rods with which he wielded the puppet, but instead of strings there were braided threads, Rastafarian dreadlocks. A shaman was watching his white puppet with cufflinks and, touching it, he felt that his limbs were not his when he stuck all the needles in his throat. Put on your vest, laugh, Pagliaccio, and everybody will cheer for you.
(Translated by Claudia Cioplea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan / Edited 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 November 2022, the group has 9,580 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 Ficțiuni Reale.
