Splinter

Arthur Ianoși
Father, accept that something is happening to you, nobody changes overnight. You were a horrible parent. Now you're all cheerful and you tell me you love me every five minutes. Don't you remember when I would get scared watching some movie, I would search for your hand and you would retract it and whip my soul? Hard to take words that I would later find on my skin cutting it with a blade. I don't hate you, on the contrary. I want you to get surgery. Your brain is filled with tumors. I would prefer to love you for six months and make you forgive me then be who I used to be.

Mihaela Moisescu
The young woman, raised in an orphanage, without many prospects, no chance to go further to college, although the baccalaureate grade was really good, I woke up with a little luggage in my hand and a few pieces of advice from the social assistant. I entered the first restaurant. I don't know what I said but the next day I had a job and a place to call mine, with the price of my virginity, my only fortune. I was the splinter fallen[1] right out of my mother's vagina, condemned for being born. I also had a criminal gene. I felt it each time I used to stay with my legs opened.
 
[1]There is a play on words that is similar to the English idiom "the apple doesn't fall far from the three" in it's Romanian version "așchia nu saredeparte de trunchi" = the splinter doesn't jump far from the trunk

Vlad Mușat
Yes, I'm getting ready for. Why is this coffin so expensive? Because it is made from a great writer who had lived a few decades ago. What do you mean from a writer? The author of the most beautiful children's stories, he was surrounded by inspiration when he stayed in the woods. It seems that a little piece of wood had pierced his index finger and infected it. He was found after some time. From the little piece of wood, on his index, there grew a beech tree. And the coffin? Didn't you read his stories, otherwise you would have guessed it. He foretold everything.

(Translated by Jessica-Polixenia-Cristiana Copilaș / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 June 2023, the group has 11,430 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

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