Yesterday It Started Falling

Ruxandra Comșa
The villagers tied the belt around the trousers, then put their peasant shoes on and went early in the morning to the market fair between the hills. Mitu, who was left home by his mom to look after the poultry, was chasing the hens when he heard the planes in the sky. He shielded his eyes and saw how some things began to fall. The first package fall into the pig slop. By the time Mitu reached to them, the famished pigs ate everything. The second package clogged the chimney and the last one almost got in the loo. Mitu ran to chase away the swarm of green flies. He gathered all the packages diligently and syllabled: Plescoi sausages.

Florentina Ghițescu
And it never stopped. The first time I lost a tooth. The tooth fairy came and brought me a little car. The second time she didn't come, my mother said it was normal, my teeth were changing. When the Lucifer fellinto my exam sheet, I didn't know how to write about the descend of the spirit into matter and I went to evening school. That's where I met her who fell into my arms from the first meeting. Now my teeth are falling out again and no one brings me anything. My pension isn't enough to make do. I'm waiting for something to fall from the sky.

Andra Toropoc
She was 12 years old and had a hard life - to get by she imagined herself in the books she read. Now she was Cosette, her mother had died and relatives had taken her in. They didn't act badly, on the contrary, they bought her beautiful things and told everyone how hard they were working to make her well. But last night they made her take off her new clothes while they filmed her. They captured the horror in her eyes along with the nakedness. They threatened her to do whatever they asked. Late she fell asleep, curled up like Cosette, in the ashes of masks peeled from haughty souls.

(Translated by Adrian-George Ilinca / 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.