Lambada

Silvia Ștefan
I've always been amused by the chicks that dream about my man. Pow! A message. Poof! A video. Some of the bolder ones send him nudes. What can I say? You lot are amazing. I know your allures, your curves, I could also guess the size of your bras. I lie on the sofa, sipping on a coffee, and watch him shaving through the cracked open door. Babe, what should I write back to the redhead? Nothing, attach that link to Lambada. Maybe she'll take the hint to shorten the length of her skirt in the next selfie. We get caught up in laughter and the mood for love. Are you finished there, yet?

Denisse Oana Rădoi
I was 9 years old. I was taking out the trash and mentally sorting out the words which had suddenly entered my vocabulary. Consignment, currency, horoscope, dictator, genocide. I empty out the bucket into the container. The weather is sunny and from a window the Coppa del Mundo anthem can be heard. Out of nowhere, my first mutual love pops up and invites me to dance. He gives off a smile, I, teenage tension. We exchange through movements that flow into each other. Someday I will write about this, I tell myself, and breathe a sigh of relief from the burden of intensity. Dansando Lambada.

Andra Toropoc
In the month of May, we fell in love and touched each other's bodies in the trendy dirty dancing. Two years later you were sending me postcards from 2 Mai in which you were writing that you're in love with another girl. Back then I could cry and I shed heavy bitter tears in my loneliness, listening to those sharp rhythms to which the two of us wouldn't be dancing anymore. That's why I don't like this song, it pains me with its liveliness and I can't understand how you, having returned here after decades, are looking for me and want me back, when the disco of our souls has fired its DJ.

(Translated by Laurențiu-Gabriel Niculae / 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 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.