The Sunday Afternoon Dairy

Dan Banu
My parents are very worried. At the TV was said that Nicu, the last man that still works, is coughing badly. That's because of the Carpathians cigarettes he smoked in his youth. Nicu worked at CFR[1]. Since he would have hit the axles with a hammer at the Jirlău station to find out which one is cracked, he paint the down red. He became the best car doctor. When one of them starts to grumble, the big manufacturers call Nicu. He listens carefully to the hum, hits the hammer right where it's needed and the car comes to life. Now that Nicu's dying, the robots will eat us.
Nicolae Popescu
Everything went smoothly. The Sunday cruise to the desert island, the explosion in her cabin, the way I jumped overboard and swam to the shore. Now, I'm waiting the guy with the helicopter. Why is he late? Soon it's getting dark. Animals howling are getting closer. I start trembling. But what's there off-shore? I rub my eyes. It's Vera, with her hair untied, like a water witch. She's holding a log with one hand, waving a long knife in the other. One second and I decide. I rush into the jungle. I choose the lesser evil.

Nelida Holban
I used to collect memories, knowing that they are my white money. I used to keep in a drawer letters, photos, a tape I recorded him long time ago with, the diary I wrote in what I couldn't tell him. In the black days when I missed him, I used to re-read what he wrote to me and listen to his voice. That was the relief. Years passed by without us seeing again. Life has settled down into a different stillness. Sunday was my birthday. I suddenly missed youth. I only looked into the letters. To listen to him again - that I couldn't do. The diary? I've never opened it again. So that I won't cry my silence.

(Translated by Florina Georgiana Țîncu / 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.