New Times

Sanda Vaideș
I have been leafing through Scînteia newspaper from 1984. It's like taking a bath in a tub of boiling water. TV programme: the Professions of the Five-Year Plans, the Youth Political Song Contest. Workers' Report, Long Live the RCP, The Strength and Vitality of the Revolutionary World View: 166 years since the birth of Marx, Party Tribune. I browse Cinemagia 2024. It's like diving into the ocean: movies, news, reality, sports, cartoons, music, commercials, cosmos, jungle, crimes, museums, etc. Old times. New times. Biblical times.

Ionuț Morariu
A holistic detective, Xi knew there was no such thing as a perfect crime. Just incompetent cops. A belief that, secretly, Scotland Yard shared. They only called him when reports from internal investigators began to look like porn movie scripts. More and more hollow. The only conclusion of the distinguished British forensic scientists was that the perfectly severed limbs of the victims formed two letters. C and T. Gentlemen, Xi told them. It's the hammer and sickle. Like us, the criminal is building the new man.

Ioana Bostan
They hooked up at a monster party. The hut was full of stinky, unfiltered cigarettes and long hair. The open windows rattled with nerves, and the carpets wilted on the discarded butts. Theere aaare some people who diiid us dirty. No use for screaming. Even the waves couldn't wash them away. My neighbor's a carpenter, yoo, the broken front door was roaring. I'll get Jeni to get rid of these creeps. Yoo, can't you hear, get out. Stere and Adeline kissed on a vinyl sofa. The girl's belly button quivered placidly in his studded buckle. Perfect.

(Translated by Andreea Iulia Udroiu / 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.