You either Have It or You Don't

Ramona Ungureanu
The dragon was coming hard from the right, but there was a small curve and he was talking on the phone and he was blond. I pushed on the brakes, going over three pansies from that mayor's new roundabout, which I don't know what was doing in the middle of the road. I? No, the roundabout. And he smashed into me. The roundabout? No, the dragon. Listen lady, please and s'il vous plaît[1], this morning my wife gave birth, I am on duty, instead of holding my crown jewel, who my wife says came out black because of the coke and the gray life, so, do you have the driver's license or not?
Vero Anttheia Teodoru
If I have or if I don't have a job at eight o'clock, I'm going to the fair. On Sundays, the usually deserted street is full of life. There are only two stalls, the rest of the sellers have the goods on the ground. Plastic slippers, fancy dresses, basins, flannels, vegetables, everything. At one end the grill with mici[1] full of juice spreads flavour throughout the village. I hope to manage to get some too. Crowding. I walk around it once more, I ask for prices. Then everything goes out suddenly. Among the mustard-stained cardboard a few dogs are sniffing around. The smell accompanies me home. Carmen Tot
The batteries haven't been silent for two days. We crawled like worms through the bare earth, muscular brown shapes of the globe, spitting black and foretelling death, but death was us, in us, only the picture of the mother not getting wet, she gave birth to me on a day like this. Then I saw the village up ahead, with the tower of the church lit by the sun. In a forest, a girl pulled water out of the spring and sang of love. I rushed, she screamed and I laughed kissing her ripped bottom of the dress under the whistling of blackbirds and shouted: we don't die, we still have life to live.

(Translated by Corina-Alexandra Belu / 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 July 2023, the group has 11,540 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.