I Won The Nobel Prize

Costi Gălățanu
You, take the Nobel? Come on, why would they give it to you? a friend asked me, bursting out laughing. With science you're parallel, with writing you don't, you have no talent, mon cher. You are a ruffled old man, gloomy, drunk and alone. Well, maybe that's why I got a light bulb. For what, being drunk? Don't worry. You don't even excel at that. There's a lot of people who can beat you. Not for drinking, man, for loneliness. All right. That's not what it's for. What, Marquez didn't take it?

Silvia Ștefan
Because the grand prize wasn't invented for me, I made it myself. A crystal Nobel with a hole in the top. Every time I feel like cheering up, I pour something on top and bang. I've already got red carpet under my slippers in the kitchen. Apply it not the usual light, it's the mother of the strobe. This long shirt, a little over the lip, looks like the latest bald designer creation. A little Irish, please. And the right hand starts a refill. What was I saying? Ah, thank the audience for. Fuck off. Blitz. I'm glowing.

Titela Durnea
I wipe off the dust. I arrange the vase on the eightieth mile received dowry. Beside it, the urn of dreams. Prematurely deceased. Neutralized by my own dynamite. One survived the genocide. I remember how the white flag waved spasmodically, spotted. We finally fell to peace. The night the phone rang. For a long time. I didn't answer it. I found out later that it was consensual. They assigned it to me by default. A dream like a speck of dust. I'm trying to remove the stain left by the Pelikan ink. Dusting. The urn is full.

(Translated by Iulia-Mihaela Țugulea / 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.