Scarecrow

Caterina Tudorache
The four old ladies were snoozing. Girl, wha' do they offer here? Do they give us shopping bags? Does he/she have oil? Shut up, you girl, there is the town hall meeting. Did he give coffee? The blind one, having activated the radar of free-things-to-get, waved at them that there is nothing to be taken at home from the table with leaflets. She stumbled over a thread. Suddenly, there was dark. A child began to cry. The mare yelled in agitation that everyone should stay calm. The blind woman sat down looking for the plug. Coughing, she rose up with the tablecloth. The child began to scream. The mare stared with his hand in the air. The cocotte fainted.

Viorel Spinu
When I was young, she would come to me before I fell asleep/ was fast asleep and would whisper to me. If your parents died this night, what would you do? I couldn't recognize her back then, I would fall asleep terrified. She kept coming. Sometimes she would stay with me a little longer. I would stay in bed under the blanket, while she was there with me. I was really afraid. Then I felt her fear. The scarecrow wished for love. She was so lonely. She was scared. She wished so much to play. She did not want to harm me. We have five minutes left from today's session. Same time, on Tuesday?

Andra Toropoc
No one knows how the hanger with that dress hanged on it got in the tall tree all the way from Vitan post office. It has been there since early summer and I told myself that someone had lost a bet, but the time and the wind had left it there. During the day I see it hidden among the leaves, ragged by sun and sparrows and at night headlights make it seem longer and bring to it moving shadows. It looks like it is inhabited by something and the bottom of the dress which is sticked with a strange dampness is waving. It is not raining, but from the close by well, footprints that are lost near the tree can be seen.

(Translated by Irina Vild / 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.