Leather and Boss

Carmen-Ecaterina Ciobâcă
Look at her, man. So much orange peel on her thighs, can't she look in the mirror? And that one over there, her rolls are stacked on top of each other, like the Michelin logo. The one who just went by got a lard-arse. Here's a good one. Ah, actually not, she's got a flat profile. The one that runs after the brat, what a pity. Excess breast-feeding. Sigh. No luck. I came here to see the sights and look at what I got. He got more comfortable on the deckchair, like a boss. He pats his overflowing belly and burps from deep within. "At least one good thing about today.

Florin Tamaș
Leather, put some more on the fire. Boss, all I got left is the tomahawk tail. Burn it. And then what if grizzly comes? We tie him up with Hatatitla's rope and spin him around. And Iltschi? Keep him on his toes when we run. Boss, I read this one reaches 56 an hour. Leather, you can read? You can write? Well, boss, who do you think gave Karl May the manuscripts for Winnetou? Hey, Leather, I'm changing my mind about you. Let's get to know each other better. I'm Lex Barker. A pleasure, I'm Pierre Brice. Mastro, take two please, with the artists.

Titela Durnea
The wait is over. Sibiu, 13. Varied people, umbilically united by emotion. Unusual audience. Cold. A backing track that tenses my muscles, wrinkling my skin. Then darkness. Greedily, consecutive monologues and scenery take over my mind. I spin on the merry-go-round for two hours as long as two eternities. Through hell and heaven, carnal desires and existential questions, decadent and burlesque, injury of body and soul. In the end, conscience decides who's boss. It's not about the word. It's about living. Chapeau.

(Translated by Adriana-Maria Botea / 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.