At the Last Minute

Siranuș Hakobian
As a teenager, I was a bit of a dreamer and my parents, pragmatic people, quickly took me to a famous psychiatrist to correct that flaw. The doctor groped me, poked me and asked me about how I slept, and then, looking concerned patted me on the shoulder and said: it's depression, sir. And since then I have lived through my depression with stoicism, without fighting against my fate. Only now, when I'm old and feeble, have I thought that the psychiatrist might have been wrong. In the end, I'm on board with hedonism and whatever else I damn like. Clearly: that shrink was wrong.

Andra Toropoc
He couldn't get off his mind the voice of his wife screaming on the phone that she didn't want to do it anymore, that she was at the end of her rope, that there was a monster in the house biting her breasts. Their baby, that is. She'd been agitated ever since she'd given birth, but today had been worse, she'd screamed that she was going to end it all and then stopped calling. He panicked, stormed out of the office, raced home with a pounding heart, heard the crying, rushed into the room and lifted the baby out of its crib. He sighed in relief. He found the note later after he heard the news of the woman who had thrown herself on the subway tracks.

Adriana Patroi Miu
In my home town, people know exactly how many days they've left to live. They write them down on tablets and wear them around their necks. They save everything carefully. They measure their wealth in minutes and friends, so they never get rich. They are not overjoyed, aware that life is short, but they are not all sad either: before their last sunset, they embrace their family and plant a tree in front of the apartment building, on whose branches their memories will blossom. It's a real pleasure to walk the streets in spring.

(Translated by Alina Bâznă / 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.