This Fall

Daniela Toader
This fall I'm not going to sew your buttons at equal distances, I'm not going to do your laundry below forty degrees and forget to add Calgon, this fall I'm not going to tell you to spray the trees or ask you to pick up the pears, nor am I going to cook you a chocolate pear pie, I'm going to chop the vegetables for the boeuf salad in big chunks, as big as I can, this fall I'm not going to tell you to blow into the pickled cabbage, nor ask you to taste the soup, to see if it's salty enough. This fall I'll try to make myself believe we had never met.

Daniela Toader
I'm going to think about you this fall. I'll think about you while boiling potatoes for mashing, while chopping carrots for the boeuf salad, while not ironing the sheets perfectly, I'm going to think about you. Even when I'm having coffee in the backyard by myself, I'm going to think about you. And then, one day, it'll start snowing and we'll set up the fireplace and we'll tell each other how hard it was for us to be apart.

Mariana Jurat
I'm going to fall in love. I can't wait for spring to come. I've been waiting for too long, and time is not in love with patience. The flowers of evil have dried up. Baudelaire became helpless in front of my stubbornness in putting an end to the epic of a coward and existentially impotent woman. Damn it, I'm human. Today is the day I start worshiping life as one should. I'll learn how to fold sarmale the way my mother did. To successfully open a bottle of sparkling wine. To ride the bike and walk across Paris. I'm going to fall in love this fall. With you, the one in the mirror.

(Translated by Cristina-Andreea Dobre / 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.