Spring Starts with Tinder

Ana-Anca Răstășanu
This spring chicken of a boy got himself one o' them cellular with applications like the city folks are usin'. Word is if ya wanna find yourself a pretty young flower you hafta do it on the line. He called it sum thin', not sure I got it right. With the way they look, I told \'I'm he's only finding wilting' flowers. Soon as one he gets one of \'em naked he moves on to the next. I told \'im to be careful, I did. What if this Tenderer gets him for that? Course, he didn't listen. Some nine months later he told me the hay he rolled in last spring sprouted flowers and now he got himself a young in.

Gheorghiță Mircea
After thousands of swipes he chose her. Black hair, black eyes, a dark look in her eyes, all were as he'd wished and he had her image in his mind ever since she had left him years ago. The date was scheduled for tonight. He didn't find the place weird either, he only got the coordinates. He drove as if guided by a voice. As he got closer the voice turned into that of a woman calling for him. When he got out of the care he found himself at the edge of a dark abyss, under a dead tree where a black bird seemed to be waiting for him. You want Leonore? Will she come? Nevermore.

George Dometi
In front of the towering apartment building, the snowdrops watch in shame, their heads lowered, as I make my way inside. I can't believe I'm about to do it either. I, an educated young man, coming here just to... Terribly nervous, my shirt damp with curiosity and impatience, I check my breath and wipe the sweat off my palm on my impeccably ironed pants. I knock. The door opens to a woman aged by loneliness that I will be visiting for the next two years. That's how long she's got left to live. She's been blind for 20 years, she's got a lot of books and no one to read them to her.

(Translated by Bogdan Nicola / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 April 2024, the group has 12,860 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.