At the Barbecue

Caterina Tudorache
No. No grill, please. The outlander was begging on his knees while pulling his hoary beard out. Some lady was babbling as she was swirling at some kind of bones. Twelve bare virgins were hopping aground a giant rotisserie. On his knees, the outlander was crying out loud. No grill, please. A man full of feathers stood up and started to smell him. The crowd went silent. He shook his head at the lady and so she stopped the grill. The outlander laughed. Thank you all. I love you. The man covered in feathers shook his head again. The crowd was cheering while a gigantic cauldron was fixed on the fire. No grill he says, we'll make him stew.

Daniel Popa
I have no idea how he survived. He was starring at me. But he could not see me, for sure. First days are the hardest ones. The painful ones in particular. I told him that everything in here, is reversed. Here, in the basement, there is the winter kitchen. At the ground floor is the summer kitchen and as you descend you'll find the bathrooms. In order to have warm water, you descent one more floor and find the common room. And even lower are the bedrooms. It's no other way to sleep in such heat. But I don't think he heard anything I said. We both looked up at the same time. The sun beams were getting contained through the bars. Near the bars, was boiling, what we used to call dinner.

Marian Benone Mihai
It was a Saturday afternoon when me and my colleagues, day shift watchmen in the graveyard, had a whip-round among the relatives of the dead ones. We bought beer, some minced meat rolls and we started a barbeque. Manele[1] music was coming from the other neighbours' barbeques. The vibe in the air was so chill until, out of a sudden, a hit sound, followed by a deafening hiss. Shortly after that, we've all received a RO-alert notification on our phones, in which we were informed that a meteorite had fallen on Earth. Right where we were at that moment. I had a more cautious look around only to see that a piece of minced meat roll fell from the grill into the ember.

(Translated by Constantin Grigorescu / 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.