With My Idol

George Dometi
I write so well when I drink, except I've had this intolerance to alcohol since I was 6 years old and I got totally hammered after a cherry pulled through the demijohn. It was strong, because it had fruit, sugar and plum brandy. I'd been sipping on it till I dozed off and saw heaven. The doctor gave my father the most terrible news, that the child shouldn't drink. And I'm Moldovan, and the fact that I have never put a single drop of alcohol in my mouth was a curse from God. Idol? I do have. Also a drunk.

Vlad Mușat
My grandfather was a giant who in the summer would help me reach the ripest cherries. I was 4 years old when he was taken away by the ambulance. After a few days they brought him back home. He was tired. I put the little green soldiers next to him and asked him to play. He nodded yes. He coughed a lot, really a lot, and bloody. I got a little scared, but his smile reassured me. It was magic, to colour his little soldiers, to tell them apart. He was with the bad guys, I was with the good guys. He couldn't speak, so I had to imitate the sounds of war for him.

Paul Dârvariu
He was called Țăvușcă. For hours I would spend staring at how he turned red-hot iron into horseshoes. Whenever he stopped to wipe off his sweat, he would show his gold teeth and ask me if I would like to be his apprentice. I would have loved that. Later, sniffing a steam locomotive, I discovered what attracted me to Țăvușcă's forge. The smell of burning coal, that's what it was. Recently, I found a sack of coke in the storeroom. Whenever I'm sad, I'll throw two or three balls into the stove, leave the door open and breathe in my childhood.

(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.