Graphomaniac

Arthur Ianoși
The three candidates sat quietly in the shell tables waiting for the exam results. A troubled cuttlefish, a pen-fish and a complaining hedgehog. The subject had been Prosaic Poetry in Early Atlantis. The examiner, a hammerhead shark with Cioranairs and graces, nailed some nails to soothe his ADHD. After long analysis, I decided, he said in a baritone voice. The winner is the one who wrote: Why write only a little, how expensive the canned soup is, the hedgehog is a loser. Where are the appeals filed?, the hedgehog screams, mad with anger

Adina Colțea
For a whole day Mitică[1] the snail crawled over the pages of books and handwritten notes. In the evening I found him smiling. He sat on the sole of the lamp and looked lost in thoughts at the light bulb. Take the flashlight, he said and light up my trail. Well, come on, you've driven me crazy. I take the flashlight and look closely at his trail. Dude, are you crazy? Where my Mitică passed, lines and thoughts, stories and even poems, typed tiny and slow, without character limits, appeared uninterruptedly. I turned on the light. There were letters everywhere and Mitică was nowhere.
Andra Toropoc
At school we were told: don't sit still, you have to know something, write what you remember, fill in the sheet, don't hand it over empty. That's how I passed the semestrial test papers, with memories of topics. Some teachers expanded their knowledge and made the sign of the holy cross thankfully. Others told me that my pen was incontinent, that they wanted calculations, not pages with words. Some stubborn ones who had no idea Newton loved Leibniz depending on his mood. They gave me three. Full stop. And from the top? I asked evilly, and they hurried to make an eight out of three.

(Translated by Corina-Alexandra Belu / 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 October 2023, the group has 11,950 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.