Cabbage Rolls

Monica Aldea
Calipsița and Agripina are the 80-year-old women from the ninth floor, ninth block, Nine Street. They always go to Eufrosina the day after Christmas. Few decorations this year. You don't try so hard lately. Eufrosina brushes it off. She serves cabbage rolls and shuts their mouths for a while. After dinner, a game of Canasta. Sister, some sarmale would be nice. Or aren't there any. Eufrosina listens and brings them a plate. Three times. Nasty illness, amnesia. On their way out, Agripia complains to Calipsița. Let's get a cabbage roll, that cheap Eufrosina didn't even give us one to ease our hunger.

Vlad Vasiliu
There's a whole plate of sarmale on the table. They were cooked in a Polish pot with tomato sauce from Italy. This morning, I bought Egyptian rice from a German supermarket. I already had Bulgarian pickled cabbage with salt from Sri Lanka in a barrel from Hungary. I was on the run, and I grabbed the last of the pork jowl from France, delivered by a Swedish truck to the warehouse of a Turkish online steakhouse. My family from England flew to me in an American plane, and we are all enjoying our Romanian cabbage rolls.

Elena Fermuș
Yes, Mom, we'll arrive on Christmas Eve. See what you do with the cabbage rolls. You know pork is not Nastratin's thing. Turkey? Neither. He's allergic. His tongue will swell. Damn it. Veal then? Oh, no. What's wrong with veal? Leave it be. Let it grow. An ox. Who, Nastratin? No, he's a bull. I'm talking about the veal. A growing ox. Really, Mom, I don't know. It got up to me. Who? The bull? No, Mom. The cabbage rolls. Use chicken neck. Lots of it. Onions? No. Necks. Smoked meat too? Burnt frog legs. Croak-croak in the cabbage juice.

(Translated by Alin Sescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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.