I Don't Care

Lucian Domșa
I shouldn't care about doing dialysis three times a week. I shouldn't care about being diabetic and an insulin addict. I shouldn't care about me passing out in front of the Dialysis Centre the other evening, when my blood sugar dropped and I couldn't react. I shouldn't care about not urinating anymore. I shouldn't care about a lot of people asking me why I'm not signing the waiting list for the kidney transplant, but I don't trust it. I only care about God and the cross he gave me to carry.

Roxana Popescu
When I mix beer and ice-cream, I scroll on Facebook in the spirit of digestion. A post about Musk's boldness, a video of Dragnea cooking. I react with a LOL emoji to the tough-ass cook comment. Digest Duo ad. Well, the bathroom echo. Today is Tudor Chirila's 49^th birthday. He was cool in '96, LOL. I unfriend him. Dan is in the common friends section. Oh, I know him, he lives on the 2^nd floor. He has photos of a newborn. Loads of photos. I'm giving him a heart-react to one and comment with a champagne emoji. Maybe he will help me carry the furniture when I move out.

Iulia Biro
At the party in the college dorm room which was packed with people, with the potato sack still left behind the door, he opened his presents around 10 pm, while not many of them were drunk yet. He enjoyed everything - be it a mug or a T-shirt. Oh, I heard him, I got pants. He was waving the blue and red checked boxers above his head, rarely seen among the Romanian pants at that time. He went to try them on and told me to come in two minutes. I found him wearing nothing but the boxers, shaking his legs one at a time laughing: I don't care, I don't care, I don't care which way it comes out.

(Translated by Cristina-Andreea Dobre / 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.