I Am Writing

Sanda Burță
I while away my days here, in the room at the rear of the publishing house. It is on that sagging mattress that I sleep. Sometimes I dream. Behind the screen, there is the bucket where I relieve myself. It's the tie that binds me to my father. You are of no use but to carry someone else's chamber pot. The table wobbles when I write; I have to place something under its leg. I write for a column called Mariana's Advice. A magazine for ladies. I blow into my hands and I start writing: Dear sad Chrysanthemum, don't be carried away by a dream. Someday I'll unbind that rope. Someday.

Răzvan Drăgoi
The debris of perfection. There, the sunset is splendid, the leaves couldn't be more colourful, nor the babies more beautiful. All these and a few other are the reminiscence of the paradise. Splinters of the absolute tucked in the mouth of an ephemeral time. How am I supposed to write about perfection since being a human implies that I'm inevitably imperfect? Perhaps each letter is an ideal sound, words build and destroy worlds, and I'm but the hodgepodge between them. Chaos. Maybe, as a matter of fact, I'm writing to myself.

Diana Andrasi Zarnoveanu
by the candle. With my feet shivering in the socks knitted by my grandma. They scratch my ankles a little, but I must finish my homework. La, ma, pa. Ana has apples. The Party loves its people! the 80s was the longest communist decade in the history of the candle-bulb competition. Suddenly the light turns off right at the syllable re. Today I write by the pool, with the neighbourhood moms, about inexistent men and Victorian Eros. The party doesn't love me anymore, and the socks are not useful either when I'm writing. Ana and her apples flicker in the light of the most absolute Alzheimer's.

(Translated by Bogdan Macarie / 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 January 2024, the group has 12,500 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.