Spring Starts with Tinder

Camil Popescu
I had an argument with my wife so I logged onto Tinder. I uploaded the coolest picture of myself, from a few years ago. Tall, blond, with a well-defined biceps, somewhere by the sea. I scribbled over my wife, who was next to me in the photo. I wrote: recently divorced, looking for a long-term relationship. I hesitated for a moment, deleted long-term and wrote something casual. That seemed too unserious, so I deleted something casual, and I checked I don't know yet and hit enter. The first profile I saw was my wife's. Recently divorced, looking for something casual. What a bitch.

Ionuț Morariu
Forgetting was taking too long to happen. She was buried more than three years ago, but she was still alive in his heart. He was unknowingly looking for her in every woman he crossed paths with. There weren't a lot of them. Three work colleagues, two neighbours, all of them passengers on the 104 bus. On one single occasion, he'd misheard her laugh. However, it was actually just a Fata Morgana. That was the first time he cried since the funeral. He drowned his sorrows all winter long. As it happens with any miracle, rebirth occurs during springtime. A friend installed Tinder on his phone.

Ioana Dinescu
She firmly shook the trunk of the fir tree. Heavy snow was falling, gently pressing on the swollen bud heads, catching the dry needles and shaking them towards the ground. She gathered them in his fist and spread them under a bed of twigs. She struck two stones until a spark burst to life in the middle, took yellow resin from a fallen trunk and threw it into the flame. She grabbed the hand of the girl who was closely watching and brought it closer to the fire. You can try, she smiled. It's enough for early March. It's going to burn you, she chuckled, but it won't do any harm.

(Translated by Oana Ionescu / 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 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.