Graphomaniac

Florina Hegedüs
Today I met the one in me who didn't flinch when two hands grabbed her middle and pulled her back from the urge to throw herself in front of the train, the one who shuddered at the touch. I remain flabbergasted at how weird she is. What's more, she looked me in the eye blinking like rhyming verses and with her passionate lips whispered in a lyrical tone: You're stupid. And she stepped out of me and walked away. I didn't get to see who saved her. I want to be like her. I wait for another train, I bend down, two hands gripping my shoulders. And I push.

Iunia Augustin
He was famous, handsome and charismatic. She was unknown to him and to the world. Born in the same place and under the same sky, only the sky remained their common acquaintance. They met in their dreams. He always found her in his own song: Dream Girl, while she married the light of his eyes on August 27th. He didn't know it, and yet he had attended it. He'd found out from her messages. She wrote to him every day, monologued with him; 5 years of uninterrupted, creative love. They also had a never born daughter: Luna. He didn't return her love but his music still loves her.

George Dometi
I like writing in cemeteries. Where fear dwells. Fear swirls behind the eyes and wipes away everything inside, leaving emptiness. Beneath the ground, the stifled pain swarms. Beside a gravestone a cat eviscerated by rats is ground up by pinkish worms, ghastly and Rubenesque as after a stately feast. The feline's eyes still bear the face of the rodent that tore out its beak. He stares at me. From her womb is born a maiden with shaggy horns. She kisses me. My writing is turning cold.

(Translated by Adela Neacșu / 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.