You either Have It or You Don't

Ruxandra Comșa
Do you have it? I do, but do I have to? You have to, otherwise I wouldn't ask. I slip the penny into his palm, he tries it with his teeth and says, come in, but know that it's in a mood. Through the darkness of the tent stammers a stinking voice, "Watch out for the carpet, it's ready to fly away. I didn't come for the carpet, I came for the lamp. The lamp is broken, it's genie-less. It was getting old and kept ailing. I paid, I said. I still have the crystal ball and the time machine. For a one more penny you get the lottery numbers, for two more you grow in the blink of an eye. Do you have it?

Florin Tamaș
When I was first born my mother wasn't at home because she was in the hospital and my father was at the factory and he gave a bottle of brandy to his Foreman to let him on the phone and he asked my mother if she had it or not and she said no and he left her the number of the switchboard and the inside and a nurse called and the foreman called my father to the ward to tell him " you have a daughter, man" and my father said ehh, may she be healthy and the foreman laughed and said no, you don't, you've got a boy and Dad jumped up with joy and took them all out for a beer and got drunk and forgot to come and see me.

Radu Gramatovici
In the mirror, I was dancing harder and harder. And I was digging. I danced and dug until her head appeared, stripped of all worldly imperfections. So beautiful was she. In reality, my left arm was squeezing tighter and tighter, probably because of the splinter that kept rising from my finger to my shoulder. I took the skull and watched myself hold it in my mind until the splinter actually pierced my heart and then said in the mirror: not to be or to be, which, of course, was not a question but an announcement, that all being clear now, I could die. And I really did.

(Translated by Alina Bâznă / 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.