The Winter of a Bearded Old Man

Arthur Ianoși
Suzana Heleșteu[1] didn't have any children, because she couldn't conceive. She hadn't had much luck with men either. People said she's too tall. Sometimes, during church, if you stood behind her, you couldn't help but notice how broad she was in the back. December caught her in a lonely concubinage crocheting a sweater for whoever it may be. A year ago, she had been baking some sweet bread and by the time she'd chased away some troublemakers who were throwing snow on her porch, they had all burnt. She looked in the mirror, sighed once and carefully glued on the beard she had bought from the town.
Daniela Toader
I stayed up all night long with my eyes glued on the TV and the landline pressed against my ear. The shooting was downtown, in Modarom tower. The ruins near the telephone box had been transformed into bunkers. The bullets whistled beyond the windows and heavy black boots stomped on the cobblestones. Out of fear, we closed the blinds and turned off all the lights. So they wouldn't see us. Then, we went down into the basement. So they wouldn't hear us. The Americans will come, you'll see, grandpa told us. Sometimes he'd grow a beard, sometimes not. That winter was really hard.

Andrei Tiganus
The little old man stepped cheerfully out of the hollow and inhaled the fresh air. Then he went back in, his beard shivering from the cold. How come the winter came early? These people, they only bring rubbish. With their cable wires and their unbearable 5G, filling the forest with antennas. They need the internet among the trees to giggle in those squares of theirs. And now they've brought winter earlier than it should be, to ruin his beautiful organic harvest. He sighs loudly and grabs the landline. It's the fourth call this month to the forestry department.

(Translated by Maria-Ilinca Darie / 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.