I Don't Care

Carmen Tot
And why should I care that today, as I walked down to the ocean, as I do every day, setting down my sketchbook on the sand, I saw her, suddenly detaching from him, like a wild animal leaping into freedom and he stood watching her, alone, while she ran into the waves, with her dark skin blotting out the setting sun and her slender shoulders tattooed with two ships, one sailing away and one arriving, turning to me for a moment and looking at me seriously: you would care if I hadn't forgotten you.

Andreea Sepi
the face of the woman behind me is impassively silent. I don't care, the vacant eyes of the man behind her. The shopping bags hang heavily in our arms. Like a well-fed snake, the line doesn't budge. The tombstone-like people wait, inert. Only I sweat and fret. Ma'am, can you open up another checkout point? I beg through the thicket of bodies. Of course, right away. The nearby lane now flickers with a green light. The cemetery comes to life. The dead men behind me leap vigorously and place themselves in front of me. The last shall be first and the first last. What a miracle.

Florina Hegedüs
I'm still dozing on the edge of the bed. I feel around for my slippers, I find them, straighten my spine, take it to the bathroom and bend it down just to wash my face and brush my teeth, I exchange my pyjamas for work clothes. They're spotless. I sip coffee while looking out the window. Last check, lights, gas, faucets, windows, all good and now I can open the door. I look over my shoulder, everything's perfect. Only the first step over the threshold feels off, cause it's spring and I'm in danger of a total reset. Checking, scanning. I want this breath of air even if I go boom.

(Translated by Bogdan Nicola / 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.