The School of Magic

Horațiu Dudău
Hello. Then the car suddenly stopped. For a second Harry felt attacked by huge white wings. Some long-armed beings carry him between two worlds. A door closes. Another one opens. An unbearable pain reigns between them. A white sun lights up. Powerful voices seem to only be whispering. Harry tries to understand. And he really does understand. Only death. When he wakes up, a little girl is holding his remaining intact hand. You were gone, she tells him. The wizard in white saved you. I want to go to the school of magic too.

Alexandra Buhudini
Grandpa, I had a nice dream last night, said the kid, through the menthol bubbles, with the toothbrush in his mouth. It was about Brer Ilie who had signed a contract with an angelic group, but FRF[1] did not give its consent and, because he could not be transferred, he dribbled a few clouds and scored a golden goal in the monastery room of the cherubim.Out of fear, they crowned him and exiled him to Bănie[2]. You should know I'm going to the practice, at Maxima[3]. Minunea Blondă[4] promised us that in the summer there will be litanies read in the stands, when our spikes will unleash the blue-white hell[5]. Dorin Vasile
I was about 11-years-old when we moved to the city. Buildings, factories, plants were rising around. I had never seen such a large school and many times I got lost in its corridors. Once I got to the wrong class and the kids laughed at me. Their teacher took me by the hand and put me in the first bench. From a twisted strip, glued at the ends, she made two more. Then she took a bottle, bent its neck until she got it out the other side. She asked me: what do you see? I blinked and saw myself years later. I was a teacher. Mathematics teacher.

(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.