Rerouting

Marian Bircea
I sold my house, gave the money to my children, and moved to a vacant lot near a park full of garbage, where I built myself a shack. In two years, I cleaned up the area and planted two thousand trees and bushes. I live off recycled waste. I can see how sick society is based on the type of waste, just as a doctor can diagnose based on the appearance of a patient's stool. I don't clean up feces, constipated and foul-smelling shit, I'm in charge of the country, voted stubbornly by dug and pigeon shit.

Nicolae Popescu
The bunny is dressed as a delivery guy. He struggles to carry a package to the bear's den. He rings the doorbell twice, that's the agreement. The bear opens the door, the bunny is amazed. That's not how it was supposed to go. He stammers: I have a package for the lady. The bear snatches the package, opens it. A vibrator? Did you order this? The she-bear denies, frightened. You hear that? She didn't order, disappear. The bunny is trembling with fear and his hips are hurting for carrying the package. Who, for God's sake, put me to role-play with the she-bear, How the heck do we manipulate this huge thing? I can barely carry it. I'd better reconcile with my bunny lady. Boop.

 Monica Aldea
At the edge of the world, the Customs Officer of Time was exhausted. He calculated the period that belonged to each, but the rations were getting smaller. People had access to the Great Counter. They even monitored their duration individually. More and more often, those who felt cheated would raise angry glances and threaten with clenched fists. But the laws were clear - he had miscalculated in favor of humans, he was supposed to correct everything. He would grant them the right to their first return and a single chance to rerouting their lives. Determined, the Customs Officer struck the Gong of Reset.

(Translated by Andreea Laura Stanca / 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.