New folder

Titela Durnea
She usually wakes up at 4. She steps lightly so that she doesn't wake him up. She turns on the tap. A woman who was once beautiful stares at her from the mirror. Today she's tired. The bags under her eyes make her pale skin stand out. She lowers her index finger to the deep wrinkle from the corner of her mouth. There are two more fine lines. She smiles. She has accepted it. The cool water invigorates her. It's the 1^st of January. Dreams and resolutions gather together to fill the pages of the new year. She goes back to her room excited, to share this with him. She realizes the bed is empty. Then she remembers.

Siranuș Hakobian
We were both licking our wounds after a long string of failed relationships. After the first dates I gave up being twice shy: he was perfect. A new chapter in our lives, he used to say visibly in love. Let's leave those old stories behind us, he also said and I completely agreed. One night, flustered, he asked me if we could take our relationship to the next level. Of course, I answered excitedly, waiting for the ring. With trembling hands, he took out the photo of his ex-wife from his shirt pocket: could you cut your hair like this?

Monica Bologa
The woman woke up in the middle of the night, opened her laptop, then a blank page in Word. She quickly started writing the story she had just dreamed. It was about a guy who lived a boring life and decided to end it. The man got to the middle of the bridge, climbed the railing, closed his eyes, then, before jumping to his death, the woman quickly saved him on the desktop. Now he's living his own love story in a new folder, on the screen of her old laptop, that has a very low battery life.

(Translated by Ruxandra Adriana Dodoiu / 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 February 2024, the group has 12,700 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.