Memories of Dacia

Bogdan Sebastian Burjan
Scorilo wasn't such a thug guy and he let them do whatever they wanted. They were eastsiders back then. With baggy, unbuttoned shirts, baggy pants, to fit it all in there. And some flat-soled opinci[1]. Like converse shoes used to be. Then Decebal came. Bad ass, that one. Big beard and a beanie over his eyes, as if he was always angry. He stopped all the parties and armed them. They became westsiders. The Romans were amateurs of blinks. They wanted their gold. These guys wouldn't quit. Bad boys 4 life. They beat them up. Andrada cried.
Monica Ciurea
On Sunday afternoon the streets were almost deserted. We set up with the gang directly on the road. We were playing red rover, a prince on horseback was passing, the black man. Suddenly someone said run away. In the blink of an eye, every pair of eyes was watching from behind the bushes. Gigel was coming. Vroom, vroom. He was mimicking moving the steering wheel with his left hand, the gearshift with his right hand as he ran down the street asking for a leu for petrol. Well, you know, this one went crazy when he got accepted to Machine Building Technology at university and his father couldn't buy him the promised Dacia car. Uh-huh.

Alex Caragian
We were a poor family, but we didn't starve even when we had nothing to eat. My mother grew up in the country, she had 11 siblings and a two-pillow bed sheet as a dowry. When she gave birth to me, she also won the lottery. Well, she was lucky for once. O 1310. My dad dyed it red. Took it apart and rebuilt it from scratch with upgrades. He wasn't a mechanic. He also took apart an all-electric truck cab back then. When he died, there was an empty seat left and although I gave the car away as a gift, he left my personal trunk full.

(Translated by Andreea-Daniela Vasilache / 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.