I Won The Nobel Prize

Ana-Maria Butuza
Goodspeed, guys. Goodspeed, Vasile, reply the fellows coming out of the mine as others prepare to board the wagons. Vasile, did you get your Nobel? I got it, Ioane, don't worry. We're disembowelling the belly of the dragon today. Farewell, God be with you, and the train, howling, is off to the centre of the earth, where the gold of the Apuseni mountains lies hidden. In the lights of the helmet lamps the eyes of the rats that swarm through the galleries shine. They greet each other tacitly, humans and rats, comrades.

Iulia Biro
I mean the gold medeal. I got it from that big guy who won it at cards, whose name is the same as the bookstore where they sell wine too. Cărtu, Cărtă, something. And this gold medeal I took to Uncle Slabu, where we play cards like boys, and I loost it that very night. I also lost the car my broter brought from America, that's why I blacked out my left eye, and my new wife, that's why I blacked out my right eye, because her father is left-handed. Damn luck that got me the nobela medeal. It's only from books written by Cărtă that I get that.

George Dometi
Way to go, Mommy. You better put that back. No, granny. It's mine. I got it. Froom who? Not froom Zoli at the end of the village. He brought blight to the village, so we scratched each other for three weeks. Take it back. No, granny, I earned it. What you win it on? At filcăi[1]? No. You know I liked writing. No, well, if you liked it, you, child, but weren't you taking wreaths, so I have an attic full of them? I do, I do. And I want to put this medal there too. All right, Herta, put it. Then where iz it from? From Sweden.
(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.