Drizzle

Lidia David
I had been left in the middle of the street, drenched and muddy, after the car started. The water was up to my ankles, so I took off my shoes, which were now useless. The dress was stuck to my body, some drivers were honking at me, others rolled down their window to shout all kinds of obscenities at me. A good opportunity to clean up the sidewalk, if that's what I wanted. The dress, which was white in the morning, had taken on the colour of a sky that was angry at us sinners, and I moved forward on the uphill street, barefooted. The water found its way through the grooves between my toes.

Vero Anttheia Teodoru
She had left without telling him. She had never done that before. She was tired of the tyranny and constant need for control, but she didn't have the strength to end it. She was tasting freedom at a cabin on the mountain top. It kept raining for seven days, during which the police searched for her. She had thrown her phone in a dumpster. For the first time, she looked at herself in the mirror and saw a woman she didn't recognize, but who sparked admiration in her. Someone is waiting for you downstairs, at the reception. She went down. She told him bluntly: I'm filing for divorce. The rain had stopped, at last.

Anca Postescu Stancov
Child, what are you doing outside at this hour? The priest was startled at the sight of Tudorel, small and muddy up to his ankles. I want to pray, the teacher is so sad that she looks like she's crying, I overheard that she's got tickets to the theatre in the city on Saturday, she bought a new dress for a date, whatever that means, but if it keeps raining, she won't be able to make it. Father, can we pray to stop this drizzling rain? The priest opened the book while Tudorel's kind heart opened the door to the rainbow in the teacher's classroom.

(Translated by Oana Ionescu / 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.