Sabbatical

Răzvan Drăgoi
After the pandemic confinement, everybody found themselves starving. You ask me what I want. Eh, I want what they tell me I have to want, even if I'm errorist and I make a lot of mistakes. This is what an terrorist does. Are you stupid? My Midwestern friends asked me. I am, I told them, but anyway I'll take a sabbatical year to get some occultism in my head. \'That makes us most sad' they said, bringing me down bad. You can hear the broken sound of the radio, Giovanni Palestrina's composition.

Ruxandra Coman
Sabbatical year was sitting on a bench, looking at me. He saw the light turning on every morning, at 6 AM, how I fight myself to get up and pretend that I am well. He was watching me from a corner when I was buying pastry and when I was sending emails, when I was walking papers office to office, or when I was falling asleep with the TV on. Come, he sometimes said, when he was catching me looking at the sky. One day I wanted to go with him, But Bank Statement laughed in my face and I got scared again.

Silvia Ștefan
Not this, not that. He always stopped me since I met him. You have some fat there, you need to tone it. Take out of your shopping bag the coffee, the gingerbread. No you can't eat meat, you forgot how the chickens jump around in the yard with the throat cut and soaked with blood? You have no mercy. Boo. You keep the sheep without lamb? Such a shame. Your doctor never told you that you will die if you taste alcohol? You can also drink spring water on your birthday, leave that champagne. Pst. Hellooo? I'M DONE. What? I'M DONE. Hey, take your earplugs off. Hey where are you going? Hey.

(Translated by Maria Cătălina Moisescu / 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.