The School of Magic

Iulia Biro
All the schools Ella went to were magic schools. It wasn't clear to her at first that there was a spell happening - she loved to learn, she enjoyed her breaks, she read, she got rid of boredom. Soon, when her safe place was no longer her home, where the muddy gray bound her to the ground, she was in a story at school. It is where dreams, loves and hopes were born. What a miracle, there the thought that she could escape was born and came true, the thought that she could turn away and get somewhere, that she could see seas, countries and palaces, and lead would turn to gold.

Octavia Buhociu
I am smart, according to the neighborhood games, tests, grades, diplomas, quite talented, but not when the rules are imposed, a little weird, or maybe even more, according to my friends.But I'm bored to death with only this, what the teacher is doing in class. I like, on the other hand, the French class, where madame shows us an empty black top hat, then asks Qu' est-ce que c'est?, and then pulls out a white lapin, then a black one, then another one brown, and even a pink one with blue dots. This is beyond me. Tomorrow I'm taking my grandfather's greyish hat to class.

Florina Hegedüs
I tripped and broke the heel of my shoe, and I am leaning on a building that has something written on the frontispiece, whatever, I'm sure these people will fix my shoe. I enter. Dozens of eyes stare at me. I'm not even surprised, I'm hobbling. After a while they go back to their business. They pick fleas off each other and, each time they find a bug, they put it in a jar and marvel at it. They have a few. I'm not interested in what they do with them, I have my own problem, so I shout out loud what bothers me. In an instant they all jump to help me. Kind. I can even see them fixing the heel inside the jar.

(Translated by Tania Diniță / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan, Edited 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.