Soundtrack

Andra Toropoc
However I am one of you when Untold starts. I remember that August when I arrived at the police station with my boyfriend and that I had a bird with open wings on my clothes. It wasn't allowed, because it had run away. They cut off our jackets, my boyfriend's T-shirt because it had Lennon written on it. They beat him all night in his cell in order to tell them who drew on our clothes. He was grumbling and I could hear him singing Let it be. There was silence in the morning and they let me go but I took his song with me. You are free to wear your dragon wings as you wish. The old days.

Roxana Catana Tarhon
The '90s; me - a virgin with a dream. My parents were going on a business trip - I said - are you coming to my place to see a movie? And she said yes. So we rented a romantic movie, I bought red wine and, on Costel the Conqueror's advice, some scented candles. She arrived and we were checking on each other, but in order to maintain the preteens of innocence for our rendezvous, we turned on the video. Except the fact that the images were from the right movie, and the sound was from Terror in Vietnam. Two movies for the price of one, cool - she said. And just like that, I remained virgin for a while longer.

Florentina Ghițescu
Tell them to stop, I want them to stop, the screams were coming from the psych ward. It was during the night shift. She had worked at this hospital for a long time and she had seen and heard a lot, but the young woman's case shook her to the core. She was even thinking of quitting, but she had a child to raise on her own. Her husband left for someone else. She had been found in a forest, fully naked, mostly dead. After being sedated in the intensive care unit, she was transferred to their ward. Since then, the woman's screams added the final touch to the horror film that had become her life.

(Translated by Andreea Cuprian / 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.