Unbuttoned

Gheorghiță Mircea
He was getting dressed and looked at her smiling. He had spent a lifetime searching for her in all the women who had ever loved him but she was his only true love. He leaned to kiss her glancing at his gesture in the mirror. A detail horrified him. The one kissing her in the mirror had a shirt on, all buttons undone, while he'd already done up all of his buttons. She noticed his tension. Are you leaving? No, I am going downstairs, I need a shirt. He rushed back, put on a new shirt, did up all the buttons. He looked at himself in the mirror. All good. He drew near to kiss her. From the mirror the other man stared at him with a bare chest leaning over his love.
 
Florina Hegedüs
Mimi has been the most incredible woman in the neighbourhood for almost a century. She's always singing. At home, in the street, even when I confess to her that I am longing for my dream girl. My seventy-year-old neighbour Grigore passed away. They say that Gedeon, an eighty-year-old, died in a woman's bed as well, just a week later. It's rumoured that it happened in the same way. There is a lot of grief in the neighbourhood. I am waiting for Mimi, she's joining me to the funeral. And there she is and she's smiling at me, like a flower to the sun, and she's singing and we play Truth or Dare and I really don't know what to think anymore while I am doing up my underpants. I am half-dead, half-alive.

Alex Caragian
I went on a round the world trip in a white paint balloon. I had finished painting the doors, when I rolled up my sleeves carelessly with my palms full of wood paint in front of the washbasin. Because of the liquid pigment between my fingers which didn't wipe on my shirt, my hand slipped on the round tap and along with it my entire body. I don't remember how many times I rotated around my axis, but eventually, because of the speed, I was wrapped up in a huge translucent coat of paint. If you read this, it means I landed.

(Translated by Alina Roșu / 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.