As It Is in Heaven

Beatrice Chivu
It was her first time. She hadn't done it before. She felt palpitations and a knot in her stomach. The other men thought she was experienced. They thought she had done it by the age of 30. Water droplets were trickling from her temples down her back and breasts. Her heart rate was getting high. Their gazes were following her like they were supposed to mean something. They were wondering what was the matter with her. She looked up to the sky, but on her left, a truck, on her right a tractor trailer. Her hands were clenched on the wheel. Instead of shifting into the sixth she nearly shifted into reverse. It was her first time driving on the freeway.

Ina Moldoveanu
Do you believe in the afterlife? You mean, I would live in heaven too? Isn't it enough how much I have sinned on earth? But maybe we turn into stars, the sky seems brighter and brighter. Never mind, I am better off as fertiliser for this earth, as it is more and more exhausted. The ideals of poets in misery and of those who still believe in something. Grandpa, I think you'll be reincarnated in an ass. I have been an ass my whole life. Boy, you read too much for someone your age. Tell your mum to get you a phone. Don't you have a bike or something?

Liviu Rusnaciuc Petru
Once upon a time when time didn't pass by, up there they gave and took until they drove each other crazy arguing for and against in a space of nonsense. In the meantime, time reached puberty and wanted a girlfriend[1] of his own. He searched tridimensionality but couldn't find one, so he sowed seeds of discord among giants again, so much so that they made the feathers fly until a big bang happened. It was then that the most giant of all messed with the girl's mind and made her dumb[2]. Time didn't like the dumb girl and, indefinitely, decreed on earth as it is in heaven.(Translated by Alina Roșu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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.