I Don't Care

Siranuș Hakobian
I know I was wrong to accept an open relationship, but I didn't think we'd get this far, with the German lady between us. I saw him watching her with adoration and how he touches her as if by chance. He dressed her up to his taste, in real leather, telling her nonsense, troubled with emotion. She answers like a cat in heat, pounding under his touch. I heard him giving her bubble baths, while she's murmuring something to him in Goethe's language. I told him I was leaving him. I don't care, he said, because I'm not giving up that German gear.

Gabriela Marinescu
Don't dig the land, don't do the laundry, don't iron the clothes, don't wash the windows, don't lay cement, don't mend the roof! Why? It's a Red Cross Holiday on the calendar. I work 10-12 hours a day for an overly taxed income. Starting today I have enough time to plant a tree. To change the sink mixer. They call it a sin. But is it a sin me struggling/when I struggle to live as dictated by others? Pretending to be happy? Am I allowed to smile every time I see a blooming lilly? Is it a sin, too? Does the world give a damn about my grief?

Marina Borzescu
I was happily hopping in my new little dress on the squares of the hopscotch. The cheerful procession showed up round the corner of the street. The sun was being rocked by clusters of clouds as fluffy as cotton candy. A kid flew his kite smiling as the wind raised it in playful circles really up high into the yellow-blueish sky, which turned into a canvas torn by lightning. The rain was touching the steaming asphalt and we were hiding waiting for it to leave. On the sides of the road, a little spring came out just right for the little paper boats.

(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.