I Don't Care

Ionuț Tuhoarcă
I went to bed at 20:20. I always rush off to bed. I'm an early bird. I woke up at 2:20. I usually get up at 2:00. My biological clock was off by 20 minutes. I tiptoed into the kitchen at 2:22 to make an omelet. I cracked to eggs and fried them. I put water in the kettle, which along with the ground coffee resulted in coffee through the boiling process. Beforehand I also downed a brandy. I looked out the window. Darkness and 2 dogs. A new day.

Răzvan Drăgoi
Apathy is one of the innocent definitions of death. When you practice it professionally, you realize it's all about complacency. How are you doing? I don't give a damn but I'm asking you, it's the proper thing to do. You know precisely how many damns I give about whether or not you're having a good day. My, your hair looks great. Damned midget. Congratulations on the exam. You're such a moron. You are right. Shit, that hurt to say. Fast forward a few years. Defibrillator, it's a heart attack. We lost him. Are you free tonight, doctor?

Iulia Anastasia Roșca
I don't know how I got stuck with the skinniest girlfriends in the world. Two little tomboys with no hips and tanned skin. I, on the other hand, am more plump, more feminine, by which I mean I'm fat. As soon as we got to the nude beach, they stripped off their clothes casually, like some uninhibited hippies, I looked around like a frightened cat, saw an old couple on the shore with their skin hanging off and got my courage up. I carefully exposed my milk-white body and noticed with amazement that nothing horrible had happened.

(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.