This Fall

Andra Toropoc
I like it. I can't write anything else because my fingers are scraped from cracking nuts. I count the bruises on my knees caused by the many times I fell this holiday, I'm glad they're plenty, it means I had fun. I rummage through my pockets and display my treasure on the desk: pebbles, chestnuts, a die, a withered flower, some Pepsi caps. What are you doing? the teacher asks me. Finish your paper faster. I hand her the most beautiful chestnut. Put it to your ear, you can hear the wind. That's where autumn is, she's singing by herself, there's no point in me writing about it.

Andreea Mihaela Murariu Moldovanu
She raises her eyes towards the sky, but she knows the chaos is down here. Resigned, she rolls up her sleeves and starts tidying up. She rushed to go to school again and made a mess in her closet. She takes the crumpled leaves and folds them neatly, then she makes her bed the way she likes it, with all her plushies on the pillow. What a colourful mound. Lastly, there's her desk. Books, uncapped markers, an earring. More leaves to pick up. Now everything seems clean. You're so messy, the autumn resembles you. I'll come again tomorrow. The cemetery is full of leaves and seasonless mothers.

Vlad Nastea
we'll try looking at it again. From those 20 years since we first heard this story and the 200 kilometres to Năvodari. This is all we have left: 2 solstices, 2 equinoxes, 2 consecutive birthdays at the beginning of February, rarely Christmas. I was an idiot to look at it: is it like non-Euclidean geometry?What happens in autumn when the day is no longer equal to night? What if two parallel lines had a common point and met somewhere? Like a Firefly could dance with a griffin.

(Translated by Laurențiu-Gabriel Niculae / 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.