10 Stars On IMDB

Florentina Enache
Look: you're a good writer, I know the right people that have neither the desire, nor the time to learn. I bring in clients, you write their papers, essays, theses, everything. At first, the goods have to be qualitative until everyone gets to know you, after that we extend our business among the students and we keep it mediocre. In ten years, we are all set, both us and the clients. Come on, it is definitely not going to be a first; I have heard this idea before from a chemistry teacher who was fabricating drugs. That was a ten out of ten TV series. According to IMDB, not on our antiplagiarism standards.

Marian Benone Mihai
Advertisements and discussions everywhere, saying that apparently it is the best movie since Matrix, that it has got ten stars on IMDB. I fill my bowl with popcorn, open a beer, light a cigarette and I find the best spot on the couch. I had seen The Matrix, but not really, it bored me. I turn on the TV and I see that it's a Romanian movie. I say to myself, good thing that that communist Sergiu Nicolaescu is dead, chances are I will not get bored. When all of a sudden, to my surprise, it's a documentary about the evolution of the Romanian politics after '89. What do those who vote smoke?

Vero Anttheia Teodoru
He was ready to start raking the walls at dawn, to carefully mix the lime, to make sure the colour was right. A true craftsman. I had hired him to renovate my apartment. He had his own rhythm, listened to some strange music, but what was stranger than that, was that he would suddenly stop, sit down in front of the TV and watch a soap opera. This has been the deal all along. I thought he was joking. But he wasn't. He would become stone-like for 40 minutes. It was as if he was slurping Spanish, moving his lips, repeating whole phrases. He looked as if he were in a trance. Then he would go back to work babbling: la vida es color.

(Translated by Cristina-Paula Grosu / 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 September 2023, the group has 11,820 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.