Sci-Fi

Andra Toropoc
The new girl on the block had a giant tridimensionality eye painted on her front door that seemed to beckon you into the tunnel of its pupil. She was strange, she didn't talk to anyone, she was always riding her bike with her hair blowing in the wind under her helmet. One day a curious neighbour came up to her apartment, knocked on the door but could hear no sound from inside. He pressed down on the bottom eyelashes as if they were a door handle, the eye blinked and the door opened. Inside there was just an empty cube and a bicycle with a wig hanging from the handlebars. Suddenly, the eye closed and crushed the intruder between its eyelids. The girl was hungry.

Georgiana Gabriela Fodor
The spoons kept mysteriously vanishing from the kitchen. One night, I decided to keep watch. I see a chimerical being approaching the refrigerator, I watch as it takes the cup of yogurt, eats it, puts on the lid, then throws the empty cup in the trash. Same thing happened the next day and the day after that. Until the Evening Star turned into a Trabant, then into a fantastic poem, descended into my kitchen and once again turned into a young man with a yoghurt face, yoghurt hair and yoghurt hands. That's what being on a diet feels like.

Siranuș Hakobian
Place your hand above and to the side of the neck. Feel that? It's the chip. I got mine during a baby shower, when I fell asleep with my head on the table. When I woke up I had the chip; I could tell by the headache in the back of my head. And I haven't been myself since: I'm anxious, irritated and I want a motorbike. Not to mention the sexual dysfunctions. Which is to say, if you're 40, you're anxious and you have sex problems, look out for a chip near the back of your head. That's how they'll get rid of us. If you don't have sexual dysfunctions, you're one of them.

(Translated by Bogdan Nicola / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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.