Retro

Anca Mureșan
She caught my eye the moment she walked into the bar. She was tall, old-fashioned, the coldness's type of beauty that keeps you at a distance. She asked for a coffee with rum, sat down at a table by the window and pulled a book from her purse. I was peeking at the way she was moving her curls behind the ear after turning the page. I wanted to talk to her, but I didn't know how. After about an hour, I mustered up the courage and asked the bartender to get her a glass of champagne from my behalf. The lady is my wife and doesn't drink champagne, he hissed through his teeth.

Marilena Demian
The cylinder cart was precious. With it you could carry not only the barrel to load, but also the bag of flour, the bag of sodas and especially the block from the icebox for the cooler. The bigger boiler was for boiling clothes and for making soap. The smaller boilers for the jam and zacuscă[1] were put to boil in the courtyard and stirred often with the big wooden spoon. The pot was for boiling cans in bottles and jars. The well-sharpened axe was splitting the wood cut with the mill. Nothing was missing from the house, only the people were nowhere to be found.
Cecilia Fofiu
Donna Summer's vinyl cover plate fizzes disco in his room, in the psychedelic of the night. I'm smiling knowing I am in that world too. I am opening the door slowly so the magic doesn't shatter but he hears me. He's looking at me from the armchair faintly lit by the lamp with the crooked hat; do you want to dance miss? But I only get a pack of Carpați cigarettes unfiltered. We're laughing together for the hundredth time because of the Moroder moment, when, because of shyness, his friend sent him to invite me to dance. You've become skin and bones my dear, what are we going to do? We're listening to I feel love, my darling.

(Translated by Maria-Ilinca Darie / 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.