Our Daily Bread

Carmen-Ecaterina Ciobâcă
The queue is endless. At the front, in a blue coat stained with Vaseline, there's Mr Matthew from the CTS[1]. At the back, there's the old Maria from the end of the street. She came straight from working the potato patch. The smell of steaming crumbs wafts out, tickles my nostrils, makes my tummy grumble. The ticket, girly. I can barely see through the window. I extend the aluminium penny. What are your parents. My dad's a worker and my mom's a teacher, I answer. Your dad better get out of town. This is just for APC[2]. I step aside. The bag waves in my hand like a sad flag.
Marian Bircea
We ate socialist propaganda on bread. The lard and onion sandwich, wrapped in a sheet of the ubiquitous Scânteia[1], placed in a net next to a one-kilogram bottle of water, made the journey through the wheat fields to the cornfields where we went to work the field. Typographic ink was imprinted on the bread, and the grease dripping onto the paper blended the words on both sides into a doctrinaire mess of an ideology summed up in a single slogan. No bread without work, no work without bread. The last part was a lie.
Ionuț Morariu
His bones broken by the guards' batons, he crawled to the pile of rags at the end of the barracks. He brought his forehead close to that of the old man lying there and spoke to him with his mind. Rabbi, untie me from the body[1]. A cherubic voice then descended upon him. Only the dead have seen the end of hunger, my son. The rest of us, skeletons hanging from a breadline, must chew the bitterness of our days piece by piece. Throw not from thee the gift of God. This is the bread He has set before you.
(Translated by Corina-Alexandra Belu / 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.