At the Barbecue

Gabriela Rus
I hurry, so that the soup won't get cold. I climb up the stairs with catlike steps, I don't want to shake the tupperwares too hard, but the bag rubbed both of my palms. The hall is empty, from the salons I can hear tinkling cutlery. Salon number nine is right down the hall. Madam Elena welcomes me with a pale smile. She doesn't want to eat, the nurse tells me. I walk past her. Look at her, sweet thing, she reads the book I brought her a few days ago. How good it smells. Did you make it? Delicious. There's still something good in this radiotherapy, it burnt all my cellulite.

George Dometi
That's how I saw it's done. You put two blicks. Two? No, foul. No, no, thlee. Yes, thlee and then you take the kindling. What do you mean? Cut wood, not lacked. But as small as they can be, like some small splinters? Yes, yes. Like that. Then an ilon glid. I took it from the fridge. It's good. Aftel that we light it up and we wait. Do you have a lighter? Yes, I took it from the kitchen while mum was at the toilet in the back of the orchard. Do we have meat? Yes, I caught a chick, the mottled type. We will scorch it's feathers. But is it light to do it undel this haystack?

Monica Stoian
He would caress the white horse until he fell asleep. He dreamt he was falling into a void from which he didn't want to come back from. He fallen, people gathered to see him, Uncle Ilie dead and cold, with a knife in his hand. The smell of the barbecue and the granny's scream. Bits and pieces of whispered conversations, mum dressed in black, the lit candle. Please let it be me on this horse, to take me far away. The little girl sleeps with the cheek on the Abduction from the Seraglio, in the kitchen preparations for the memorial meal are made. The pope comes to the memorial meal too, just Uncle Ilie is missing. He didn't want to.

(Translated by Ema-Teodora Rădulescu / 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.