Memories of Dacia

Radu Gramatovici
When luck was shared, my love. The music flowed tunelessly in the background. The men were sitting at the table in the dusty light of the pub, eachof them with a glass of hard liquor in front of him. Times are tough, one of them said. Do you remember when...? Ah! the other answered. Things would have been different if... Can you imagine? Yes. As it got dark in the pub, the men became lively, perhaps also due to the alcohol they had consumed. The music at the pub had also changed. They held each other's shoulders and began to sing. Under the skirt of your sweethear', you can drive your Dacia car.

Nelida Holban
Our friends were waiting for us. We still had 1,500 km to go.The planetary gearmakes a knocking noise, you said. Can you fix it? Only if we get there first. We pull over, call them and tell them what's going on and then we'll only drive on the highway. That's it, we're not visting anything anymore. 17 hours later we were parking in Tarbes. The car had made it. My sister and I were almost alive. The next day, the men started negotiating. Take the car to a garage, the French men said. No, we'll fix it ourselves, my folks said. They disassembled it. They repaired it. The Gauls' conclusion? C'est facile pour eux. Tous les roumains sont ingénieurs. Vive Dacia.

Siranuș Hakobian
I was nine years old when I first drove a Dacia, the 1100 model which grandpa keptin the middle of the shed like a trophy, with the doors open. I was driving at high speed, almost at the speed of thought, and I was spinning the pretzel-shaped steering wheel on winding roads which only existed in my imagination. On the passenger seat there was Princess Ruxandra, because back then I was reading \'The Șoimărești Family'[1]. She was hatching about six eggs on the death seat and scolding me with a critical eye. She was cackling menacingly with gallinaceous fury and I had to slow down to avoid any danger.
(Translated by Valentina Mihai / 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.