The Little Girl Who Did Not Like Homework

Mihai Dinescu
I'm in my room. At the desk. I have a pen in my hand. A lined notebook in front of me. I'm drawing. Scribbling. The pen scratches the white sheet with endless blue circles. They look like angry clouds. Storm clouds. I have earphones on but they've long since run out of battery. I can hear them. They're arguing. He shouts and threatens her. She screams and challenges him. My sister cries in the cradle. She's hungry. Or maybe she needs to be changed. Noises. Shouting. The front door slams. Silence. I hear his footsteps. They approach. Did you finish that homework already?

Monica Bologa
Ana told Vlad that she would give him a kiss on the mouth if he did her homework for Romanian class. Vlad, who was not good at stringing words together, went to Radu and told him he would give him his entire stamp collection if he solved it. Radu, because he wanted those stamps incredibly badly and was afraid of botching the essay, went to his mother, a Romanian teacher, and promised her that if she did his homework he would take part in the maths Olympiad. Vlad gave Anna the essay the very next day. Ana never kissed him again.

Ioana Clara Enescu
Grandpa is a wizard, the little girl said. The letters listen to him and sit quietly in lines, like swallows on telegraph wires. Before her eyes, they flew like bees in a hive, then lost themselves among the clouds that floated freely, sometimes over snow-capped mountains, sometimes over the fields where the maples danced with their ripe grain. With each passing day, her homework notebook brimmed with blank pages, and she grew fearful that the stories in her mind would never take on the flesh of ink and paper.

(Translated by Diana Caragea / 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.