Make the World Look Like You

Oana Jindiceanu
Resemble me, the brave, clumsy and happy girl who walked a long distance on foot today, took photos of a tree which had grown on an abandoned building's roof and of a piece of sky, just to have the tangible memory of an embrace? Me, who celebrated this day with a knowing giggle over a coffee and an ice cream? Me, the one who cannot stop smiling as her mind plays the events of the current day on a loop? Me, the one who looks forward to the future, like a child who wrote a letter to Santa Claus? Very well. See you at the theatre.

Magdalena Daminescu
I was 18 years old when, one night, I was picked up along with my sister, thrown into a cattle wagon for two weeks and deported to Dombas. I had to pay the price for being born German. I would push the tram inside the mine and dream of changing the world. There was too much injustice. I became seriously ill. A Russian woman saved me by burying me in the snow. When I came to my senses, I had a friend. She told me she really liked the world I was telling her about when I was delirious and she gave me a chance. It will resemble you, I promised her.

Iunia Augustin
Come on, aunt Nela, no one can think of his own problems, because you show up to stir the waters. You blessed all the haylofts at the neighbours' gates and three villages later with the human nonsense crap; you burned remnants of semantic incarnations in the hearth of the man of conscience and truth's patience. Are you done yet, for God's sake? It was easier for me to understand that Jung guy. I covered some semantic seeds, good for the word hole, with his ideas. What bothers you about me lays in your subconscious, he tries to warn you. There is where we'll sow[1].
(Translated by Valentina Mihai / 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.