Mini

Florentina Ghițescu
I want to grow up. You'll understand when you grow up. I want to grow up to understand why daddy left, I want to grow up to understand why mommy's crying. I want to grow up to understand why kids laugh at me at school. I've grown up. But all I manage to do is slip through life small and insignificant, creeping around walls, keeping my eyes down, avoiding all contact with people. I don't want to be a grown-up anymore, I want to be small and understand what it's like to be loved. I don't want to be a grown-up anymore.

Paul Dârvariu
Girl, I'm starting to get a little bit annoyed with this little pack. Now I'm sorry I brought her to sweep our hair off the linoleum and advised the boss to give her the chair of poor Sile. I put the scissors in her hand and she ended up stealing my customers. She says she schedules them over the Internet. You should see them sitting like dogs in chairs, eyes up her ass. I said: girl, be a good girl, come in a longer skirt or jeans like us. What do you think she said to me, she naughty girl? Thanks for the advice, auntie Zița, tomorrow I'll come without panties.

Dan Banu
Every Saturday, when the clock in the palace tower silently marked midnight, she set aside a minute, patiently gathering them one by one, waiting for the moment when she would shed her chrysalis dress and her worldly kingdom, to slip through the butterfly hole into the world of lepidoptera, a cup of intoxicating poppy, sweet prison, where space and time melted under the pressure of other boundless dimensions, colour, fragrance and sound, and to surrender to them.

(Translated by Iulia-Mihaela Țugulea / 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.