Debtors' Prison

Mihaela Popa
My house, my rules. This is not a hotel for you to come and go as you please. No parties at night. You have to be home by ten. No buts. You know you have the SATs this year and then the college admission. You'll thank us for these rules later. When we were your age, we were already working until exhaustion. We made sacrifices for you, we gave you everything so you could focus on your studies, so you could become someone good in life and so that we had someone to count on in our old age. But he, like many others, chose the path of going abroad after college.

Daniela Toader
Didu has installments to pay and the loans from CAR[1] , so, when Mia gets her advance, she lends money to Didu, until liquidation, at liquidation, Didu apologizes and Mia asks Ralu to give her more time, just until she gets the advance, when Mia can no longer lend money to Didu, because she owes money to Ralu, so Didu takes out another loan from CAR, pays his installments and is left with nothing, and then he borrows from Mia. That's how winter finds them. They all live together now, in a small kitchen, in a small house, in a small town, in a small country, waiting for the Americans to come.
Dan Banu
That's what we, those on the inside, called it, the Alcatraz of Love. From the outside it looked like an ordinary psychiatric hospital with a high fence, a park and comprised of three white buildings. When he came to from his trance, my new roommate started searching like crazy under the pillow, through the nightstand, under the bed. Of course, he didn't find what he was looking for. We were all there for the same reason, we had lost our minds over a woman. Now, he will stop searching and start crying. If he doesn't come to his senses, he knows he will forever remain indebted to her with a love.

(Translated by Andreea Teodorescu-Colciu / 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 March 2024, the group has 12,800 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.