Stuffed Animal

Anastasia Dubita
Deafening silence. Two button eyes were watching her from the child's arms. The ears had lost their shape from being put into the washer, and the colour faded into more of a gray after many months in the hospital. She closed her eyes. On the forest path leading to the lake, she could feel the wind in her hair and the cold grass against her heels. She'd found herself surrounded by flowers, in a bright garden. They were right when they said this would be a beautiful place. What would she do without her parents? She looked back. What happens to the teddy bears that are left without children? I hope they too go to heaven.

Carmen-Ecaterina Ciobâcă
I was with Vera and Mișa when they asked us to leave. Our parents were waiting for us outside. Mom didn't hug me as she usually does. She took my hand and told me to pick up the pace. The buses were waiting for us. "We'll be back in three days," she whispered to me. They took my red raincoat when we got there. They gave Vera a boyish haircut, and a couple of years later a lump grew in her throat, and gone she was. I got off easy: I can't conceive. Mișa was left alone on the chair in the deserted town's kindergarten. His beady eyes and radioactive smile haunt me even in my dreams.

Dan Banu
I twist and hit my head against something hard. I open my eyes to a wooden horse. I close them, then slowly peek. The horse is still there. You woke up teddy bear, he grinned. I try to rub my eyes and realize that it wasn't irony, for I am, in fact, a teddy bear. I get dizzy. There's nothing you can do about it, once she hasn't pulled you out of my teddy bear, you cannot escape. That aaand, he stopped, put his hand between the velvet and the sponge, and squealed. Just as I expected, you have a broken heart. I look around. The basket is full of stuffed animals. You're not going to escape, so stop fussing.

(Translated by Adriana-Maria Botea / 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.