Scarecrow

Costi Gălățanu
Petruța was the most beautiful girl in the village. She had eyes like two black holes, the lads would lose themselves while looking into them, hair like blackberry and a fairy-like body. She was also a smart cookie. She was a kid who had just turned sixteen, but she was well-developed like a ripe fruit, ready to be picked. They found her in the woods buzzed by a swarm of flies, under a half-dried oak tree, her face swollen, her legs tightened, clutching something in her fist. Radu, the boy whom she liked and who had proposed to her, struggled to take the bloody little star out of her fingers. Order of the Red Star.

Gheorghiță Mircea
Tall, skinny and insane, when she was out of her mind, she would run on the streets stopping passers-by with her hands raised and desperately shouting: You are going to die, you are going to die. Then they would imprison her for a while. While she sat in the hospice garden she would keep on reading her astrology book and, as soon as it got dark, she would stare at stars. She could not sleep, she knew that she would dream again of her house collapsing over her family. That morning she was in the TV Studio presenting the day's horoscope. The vibration of that day had been completely different from the one she had predicted.

Cecilia Fofiu
He married Marta when he was a handsome and a poor little one. Marta the wealthy and crippled one as a result of polimyitis, according to her ma. At the beginning it was hard for him but he learned to love her and he gave her three children raised mostly by in-laws. He worked during the day and carried her too to the gate, but at night he was rested by her gentle breath. Mon, I can't breathe she struggled at one point. Now, relieved of toil during the day, at night he searches in the pillows for the scent of love and finds a haggard, which is loneliness. This scarecrow drips venom of woe in his dream and drives him along the sky with his beloved one.

(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.