Anarchy and Jasmine

Ioana Epure
Fifth grade. Before the match, the P.E. teacher was reviewing the rules. You will only enter the gym in socks, this is a parquet floor, and we have to take care of it. At the initial whistle, the ball flies off, children are trying to run, they slip, they hurt themselves, and the bruises and sweat drops unite the two teams. The coach stops for a second and then shouts at them to get their shoes on. All of them. Now. 20 pairs of shoes hurt the parquet floor and the teacher's rules. You wouldn't believe it, but the sun rises the next day as well. The smell of a new generation floats in the air.

Cristina Daniela Dumitru-Pascal
He stepped outside the prison. He avoided the bus and walked. The laughter in the park hit him in the plexus, the blood rushed to his ears, and his eyes frantically searched for the source of the noise. He saw the children and his nails had dug into his palms to the point of bleeding. He felt like he shouldn't have been there and understood that all the years in prison, and all the pills didn't help. Sir, the kid called him, handing him a jasmine flower. He rebelled against himself and ran away. In front of the car. Straight there. The child stood with his hand out. A flower was shaking its petals.

Camelia Popescu
She bit her fingernails and left them scattered around the keyboard. She smells of sweat, and her messy, dirty hair sticks to her head. She slept in the same clothes as yesterday. She looks around at the mess on her desk. She sees herself too. She is alone. Maybe because she stinks. It is what it is, depression doesn't smell like jasmine. But the most important thing is that she is still alive and can write suffering porn. Not about her of course. About a friend. We all have a friend who goes through feelings we don't want to go through.

(Translated by Bianca-Andreea Rîmboacă / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 August 2023, the group has 11,680 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.