Session

Miruna Marin
I walk into the classroom and approach the desk, sweating buckets from every pore. I plug in the USB stick with my presentation, all cardiology terms and cute pictures of hearts. Guten Tag, I attempt to start. Tiii, Dorule, says the head of the department to the other luminary of the Foreign Language Faculty, also a man in his 60s. That's us. But tell me, miss, how did you arrange the pictures so nicely in the background? 10 minutes of PowerPoint for beginners, and I got an A with congratulations and hearts in Philology, German section.

Gheorghiță Mircea
Badgi was reading Kira Kiralina[1]. He held the book in one hand, the bottle in the other. I watched his thick black lips sip the beer and Fredi looked under the table to see how many bottles we still had in the crates, wondering how many we were selling, how many we were drinking. The exam session is the most free period. Free to drink and study. When is your Power Stations exam? Fredi asks. Tomorrow. And are you going? Badgi smiled without taking his eyes off the book. Sure, it's the last one. Have you read it? I have. How many beers? Enough. I'll start tonight. I fall asleep. He's crazy, Badgi said. The next day. How was it? I got it an 8, I passed.
Aurelian Țolescu
Why aren't college graduates cultured anymore? Simple. They only do three years with endless credits, it's Bologna policy. Over 30 years ago studying was serious business. In my fourth year, a colleague passed his microwaves exam, but failed radio communications. Re-exam, then again and again and he repeated the year. The next year he passed the radio communications exam, but failed the microwave. Fall session, re-exam and re-exam and missed it all. Reset and restart the faculty. Now he is one of the most valuable engineers and top manager in our country.

(Translated by Andreea Ciubuc / 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.