I Won The Nobel Prize

Andra Toropoc
I started with the grounds from the unwashed coffee cups. Green, furry, raw material for the Pasteur Institute. When my mugs suddenly vanished, I screamed and then started researching in yogurt and bread crumbs. Mankind must be helped, that's what I told them when they cleaned around me again. My penicillin is gone, people in white swarm around me numbly. They changed my sheets, increased my dosage and convinced me that literature is more important than chemistry. I write and wait for the Academy to contact me.

Adina Colțea
Take it with water, he whispered and handed me the glass held in his hands. Who are you, I wanted to shout, but I fell silent in shame when I caught a glimpse of his wings tucked neatly under his shirt. He came every day and would lure me in with a full glass. This isn't a painkiller, he laughed. "This is the prize for the most daring story written on the trail. You write with your feet, he told me, and I understood he wasn't referring to the scribbled scraps in my notebook of dreams. Come on, get dressed, we're going to buy red carpets today.

Florentina Ghițescu
Where do you see yourself in 5 years? I was doing a personal development course: NLP, hypnosis, meditation and I don't know what else, all starting with self. Self, meaning I was doing an ego-inflation module. Good. If that's what it takes. The teacher takes my answer out of the pile. I'm going to win the grand prize for peace with my theory that we're all the same, we all share a sliver of the universe. That put an end to hunger, injustice and war. You seem to have learned nothing here, young lady, you're hopeless. Leave the room.

(Translated by Andreea Cristina Moise / 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.