Sci-Fi

Florina Hegedüs
Come on, tell us. The antigalactic one. Alright! And so it happened that they were the only ones left, him and her, with soft bodies. Bleah, mummy, so gross! She loved the Sun, he loved the Moon. And on top of their house a creature fell, also soft, but small and green. Pff. They were happy, but no matter how much they fed it, it wouldn't grow. The problem came when it stole the Sun and the moon and off it went. And they? We came out of the kitchen and ate them. Soo cool! That's enough, spread the wax on your casing and off to bed. Mummy, tell us a SF one too! Some other time. After we also eat the small green creature.

Monica Bologa
I grabbed my coloured pencils and went in the garden. I sat down in the shade and started drawing. I heard some laughter at a point in time. I followed the voices. God from grandma's icon was playing backgammon with a tiny green man with big eyes. I ran in the house and told my grandparents. They didn't believe me. I went to the garden everyday to meet my new friends. One evening, grandpa wanted to play backgammon, but Vasile, our neighbour, was busy. Grandpa, may I play with you? Go away, kid, you're too young! I beat him.

Bogdan Sebastian Burjan
Invasion was imminent. They didn't stand a chance. He wrapped the time capsule in a handkerchief and gave it to him. To save himself. He got to another world, another time, where there was peace, harmony and all things worked well. It was always spring there. With flowers, perfumes and colours. The way it once used to be on earth. But for her, it was dark and freezing cold. His absence hurt her. She would have died. But there wasn't time for such a thing there. She would cry for an eternity. Then she found that handkerchief. She saw a dry booger from which she extracted some DNA and she cloned him.

(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 December 2023, the group has 12,210 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.