Black Metal

Vlad Mușat
Yes, we are that infamous band which has weird concerts. It all started ten years ago when I was a bell-ringer for the church in my village. It was a rainy Sunday. The preacher was telling the parable of the Good Samaritan while I sat outside and listened. A sudden noise disrupted the scene. A sports car ran over a baby kitten. God save us from worse, said the preacher. Although I didn't have to, I rang the bell one time in a different way, and it made a sound that I couldn't get out of my head. That's why every song we play starts like this.

Gheorghiță Mircea
When Dad added a handle to an axe, he was as thorough as the engineers which fine-tune a spacecraft for a mission in cosmos. He said: If you're just phoning it in, you work in vain. You must place the axe where you set your eyes -it shouldn't be sideways, nor wonky. Steady. He held the black metal in his big hand, running his finger along the cutting edge with a weird smile. Everbody knew his Cugir knives and axes. In our home, nobody could touch the ax and the knive for slaughtering pigs. The others were sharpened by his colleague.

Andra Toropoc
I was looking at the prettiest girl from high school, but the 25 years since graduation hadn't been kind to her. Her once blonde hair was now a pitch-black tuft at the top of her head, and gray circles framed her eyes. She used to sing folk, but now she was talking about her band and their evil riffs, while her fingers with skull rings were trembling on the glass of wine. She didn't get up to dance. She sat alone at the table, and I went to invite her. She fell asleep with her head bent down, and a bitter smile crossed my face. A tattoo on the sweaty back of her head read: Porn Piece Cold Kiss.

(Translated by Alin Sescu / 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.