Driving School

Paul Dârvariu
Girl, I signed up. Yeah, at his school. First of all, I like the car. Because it's red, with white leather tapestry, but also because it's small. There's a reason they say the length of you-know-what is inversely proportional to the size of the car. Yeah, girl, dark hair, blue eyes. A gentleman. I lose it when he buckles my seat belt. And what a voice he has. I'm dying to hear him: clutch, brake, shift gears. License? To hell with it, that's not what I signed up for. It's nothing compared to a marriage certificate.

Adina Drag
There are times when you just know. I could smell it the minute he got in the car. He smelled me back. August felt hot between us, and my fingers left tracks on the steering wheel. I cringed when he asked if I was relaxed. I wasn't, hell, I'd failed three times. The brake drums were howling as I drove. That's what they told me. That I was driving with the handbrake on. Well, yeah. Can you drive? I can. Take me wherever you want to then. I took him to the mall and bought him ice cream. He laughed his heart out. He's done all the driving himself ever since.

Alex Caragian
Mr. Professor has the school patalam of life in his breast pocket: the checkered handkerchief with faces glued together with dried snot. Incomplete, he has one hole in his soul and another in his underwear. One day when he was sleeping on the bus he felt a hand. It called out to him. The High Order of the Covrig[1]'s Swirlers waved a finger at him. The middle one. All the secrets were revealed to him: the Geography of drivers with scented firs, the History of the inventor of the stone wheel. He managed to graduate magna somehow, and though still stupid, he signals now.
(Translated by Adela Neacșu / 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.