You either Have It or You Don't

George Dometi
The toothpick hollowed out the hollow of a former tooth when someone climbed behind the taxi driver. Hi. Free? you could hear the limp beetle-like voice of a little girl. Yees, muttered the driver. Where are we going? Home.Oh, and where is that? You start the car and I'll give you directions. Okay, he spat out a phlegm and started the journey. The fare had been quite quiet, here and there one to the left, to the right, up ahead, then one here, please, who hardened the man. He had arrived at the cemetery, and the little girl could not be found.

Ioana Clara Enescu
He had read the message hundreds of times. Maybe I misunderstood, he muttered, waiting for this thought to take out the knife stuck in his heart with a few words, polite, it's true, through which it was announced that, from the next day, the publishing house terminated the contract with the last writer of humanity, as it said, in capital letters, golden, at the end. He approached the window and watched the rain fall over the city. He felt terribly alone and useless, just like a spring that found out that people could make their own water.

Monica Stoian
went to the doctors to fix me, so that I would not live like this my whole life. They said they had no options and if it didn't hurt when I stepped on it, to just remain like that. At most, when it starts to hurt, to go back to them. I stepped crookedly whenever I couldn't step straight. I've been treading properly for a while. About since you showed up. I almost forgot I was born with this defect until the joint started to hurt. I had stepped crookedly again. Have you not?

(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.