Stuffed Animal

Ruxandra Comșa
I met him at the fair. I was selling colourful balloons and lollipops. He was holding a teddy bear. Can Bubu have a lollipop too? I stared at him. He was a huge man, the rugby player type. Sure, I said. He reached for his money but I stopped him. It's on the house. Bubu didn't eat the lollipop. But he never left the stall. Bubu doesn't have a house, he told me later. I took them both home. Now we're on our fifth beer, we've already taken our clothes off and I still can't figure out Bubu's part in all this.

Iulia Biro
I got itchy at granny Rozi's house. It was red, the child insisted, climbing onto the sofa from where he was putting on an improvised performance for the guests. It was cute at first but now everyone was getting bored, except for his grandmother, who was ready to applaud his every word. Something has irritated your skin, said Maria, the god-daughter. It itched and it stung, he said, puzzled. Yes, something did that to you, Maria explained. The boy nodded: those animals on the bed, uh. The stuffed animals? Maria asked in surprise. Wait, he interrupted her. The bed animals. The bed bugs.

Diana Andrasi Zarnoveanu
The one with the floppy ear. 5 bucks. Got any change? He wiggled his wrinkles incredulously as he rummaged the bottom of his pockets to gather a bunch of crumpled bills. Take \'em. I didn't close my eyes, didn't hesitate, didn't hold my finger on the trigger too long. Floppy stood no chance. I made him drop dead with a bang. Two more anaemic pokemons were killed in action, buddies with Floppy. Then I started crying in a way worthy of Uncle Vanya. What's wrong? It's the first time I ever shot one of our guys.

(Translated by Bogdan Nicola / 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.