Down the Fire Escape

Caterina Tudorache
Huddled down a fire escape, a dromedary smokes surrounded by the smell of stew at 2. This year's coming to an end. I wonder where he's going? The fart coughed. Did it have sweet paprika? Or smoked, like us. He laughed horribly. A tattooed stork came out of the window with its wings on its hips. Guys, are we still working? What's the matter, boss, something burning? Clear the ladder before I call HR. Complaining the two model employees left. Finally, the stork smiled and sat down with his cigarette in his beak. I don't know who those two were, nobody works here. I'll give them a raise tomorrow.

Cristina Daniela Dumitru-Pascal
He climbed down the narrow staircase, narrower than he remembered, to the top floor. He sat down on a step without looking at the window. He could hear her, just a little more and you're coming to bed, darling. His sister had raised him from a young age. Selling her body. Sex brought food on the table, money for school, long nights kissing his bruises, or bandaging the wounds her clients made. At the end of college, she waited for him lying on the carpet, with a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth. A champagne on the table. She hadn't had a chance to put on the new dress he'd given her.

Ana Maria Dobre-Nir
She picked up the phone and looked at the bruise on her lip, trying to imagine what had happened. Suddenly she heard a strange noise coming from outside. She couldn't figure out what could be making it, nor could she get up to see what it was. It sounded sharp, like a gear clutch. At the window Michael showed up for a minute with a chainsaw and screaming his head off. Soon after, she saw a huge snake slithering down the window. What a movie, she thought to herself, but laid still. She just wanted a sip of water. Good trip, bad trip, I don't care.

(Translated by Alina-Dorina Nicolae / 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.