I Won The Nobel Prize

Monica Bologa
The villagers set off towards the UFO on the hill with pitchforks and axes. Child - my father told me - no one will ever take away our hard-earned land. After my father sprang through the door with his shotgun, I followed him up the hill. While the men were struggling to smash that flying saucer, I was playing in the grass with a small alien. No sooner had the warriors seen us together than the fighting stopped. Now we have ten E.T.s in the village eating polenta. And I have a peace prize in a chest in the attic.

Andra Toropoc
In sixth grade I dissected the frog so well that the teacher congratulated me and the kids called me the Doctor. Gathering my tools, I flawlessly cut out a heart again and stood by the body until its last twitch. The theory is confirmed every time, but I show in my thesis that the pupil stays fixed all through the operation. I remove the pins that held the eyelid and wipe the blood scalpel on a piece of newspaper. I read mechanically: Stockholm, awards blah blah. The fools keep ignoring me and forcing me to continue my study.

Magdalena Daminescu
And I don't dare to rejoice or brag to my friends. After a lifetime of work, they finally recognized my merits, and that's only because the Nobel Committee seat was taken by Chat GBT. This intelligence has introduced clear criteria for awarding the most controversial prize, the prize for literature, it has put first, the need for people to understand what they are reading, clear endings, not fishtailing so that everyone can believe what they want. I was right not to be pleased, I've just been told that Chat GBT got it wrong.

(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.