With My Idol

Florina Hegedüs
I was tired of visible and too accessible dogmas and to tell the truth I didn't want them as my role model. One lonely evening I was looking out of the window. I saw him standing in the street. He was watching me. I invited him into the house. As we chatted, I was struck by his frailty, so human, though he was a deity. I wanted him as a mentor, to learn from him how to surpass my limits and imbalances. I began to adore him. Only my Guardian Angel was on the lookout and said I had a pagan mind and I confused the merchandise for the packaging and to learn to love myself. What a jokester.

Lucian Domșa
He opened his eyes and pricked up his ears, not hearing a sound. It was only when the dog barked that he remembered he was at home in the village and had come on leave for a week. Was there a God of war? Or did he have one of his own, like an idol? He felt his eyes beginning to tear up, and he couldn't understand why. On the front, the officer told them they were not allowed to indulge their emotions, and he puffed up with laughter, saying: What are those? He began to tremble when he heard the whistle of attack and the command to mount his bayonet to his rifle.

Gheorghiță Mircea
My parents were always away. My mother was mad as a hatter[1], my father was at the bar. So, missing the good family upbringing[2], I was not taken to church and I didn't have to thank any idol for the genesis of a shitty world. I took things for what they were, with indifference and all was well. There were good days and bad days, if there were any idols to exist, I think the positive idol cancelled out the negative idol, like electrical charges, it balanced the world. That's how I understood the mythical bacillus who didn't give a damn about death and the day after tomorrow.
(Translated by Andreea Georgiana Bogdan / 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 November 2023, the group has 12,090 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.