At the Last Minute

Radu Gramatovici
I'd completely forgotten about that bill I'd left that call girl I'd chosen to spend my last money on, and which I'd signed before handing over, in an involuntary act of trying to leave something behind, because shortly afterwards I'd met her, the one who would bring me back to life, to a life I'd never even dreamed of and with whom I'd built a house, raised a child, had a happy family until my daughter came home with one just like it and told me it was her first hard-earned money.

Iulia Biro
I'd write a micro fiction too, if I had any characters left. I'm setting aside 11,000 for the story I've got to write soon, 3,089 I already sent in last weekend. I used lots of them at work this week but got a good price for them. I spent about 40,200 last night with my daughter, and harsh ones too, because we had a bit of a fight, then I gave away the sweet ones because I had to sort things out. I still have a stash of unusable characters on Real Fictions but they're of use in private. I've got 415 left. Can anyone lend me 100 characters till tomorrow?

Iulia Biro
What about the story? says Razvan. You've used up your last hundred signs but what about the story? Okay, I'll tell you that after a week that wrung her dry of any signs Iulia went to a book launch. When she was about to ask a question she wasn't able to articulate one word. The people around her started fussing, but she smiled, seeming just a little puzzled, so they calmed down. They pulled books from the shelves, shook them up, and gathered the extra words into a paper cup, out of which she swallowed them, grimacing, and said: then suddenly stood closer.

(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.