All Sails Up

Florina Hegedüs
She was full of life. I don't get how she can now be lying on the table covered with this long sheet[1]. She had company: traces of mud can still be seen, someone with big boots. There are pieces of plates, glasses everywhere, and there's hardly any space left to move around. Before I left last night I had told her to close the door, the windows, that there was going to be a storm. Why is there so much dust everywhere? I sat down to mourn her. I was running my fingers over the white cloth when the Wind blew. It came to the wake. It remained in the doorway. Behind it, on the clothesline in the yard, fluttered a new white sheet.
Ruxandra Donose
I stroke her hips with the brush on the canvas[1]. I watch her pose, slightly turned, on the chaise longue, her hair sticking to her temples, liquid heat rolling down her neck and between her breasts. I'd like to lift the sheet that doesn't cover her, to put the brush directly on her skin, to paint her in bright colors and rich sounds, to sculpt her with rough hands in gentle touches, to create such art, vibrant, that has never existed before. Abruptly, she opens her eyes and says, can I go out for a smoke? She gets up wrapped in the white cloth, and I fall from up high.
Andra Toropoc
After the concert in Sulina, a woman clung to my shoulder to ask for an autograph. I took her with me, her face was a bit of a wreck but her body was full of life. I only drink whiskey, water is for swimming. I thought she was joking, but she reeked of alcohol and she got me drunk on breaststroke type of moves, gliding through sweat and sheets thrown to the ceiling. When I woke up, the woman was gone and there was a little bottle with a note in it on the table was. She wrote that she had taken my autograph herself and that her hope was fulfilled. My wallet lay next to me, it empty and me naked.

(Translated by Andreea Teodorescu-Colciu / 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 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.