The Moon in the Sky

Alina Ilie
You said it had to be a full moon, and it's not. It is, look, it's perfectly round. It's not. Look, do you want to do it or not? I'm going home because you're an idiot. No, wait, okay, it's full. What do we do now? Did you bring the hair? The girl reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a blonde curl. What did you do, did you cut it? A couple of strands were enough. Now take this knife and drip a little blood here on the stone. The girl also left tears on the spot and, stirred by the wound on her finger, whined like a child. Listen here Omida[1], if by tomorrow Ionică doesn't love me, I'll hand you over to the police.
Alex Caragian
It wasn't Mimolette yellow cheese wheel aged for months, ripened for flavour, crumbly as an old lady's bones, or some Swiss cheese puck full of cavities serving as a side dish of onion soup in a cold winter, no, my bubbly moon, had on the inside, to everyone's surprise this morning when I cut it into two symmetrical pieces, a spherical mirror with a neon rim which when installed in the bathroom revealed to me the wisdom that life is the gasp between two love scenes.

Ionuț Morariu
They put me in a mental hospital. They say I suffer from a mental deficiency. I misidentify the causes of things. How did they figure it out? It's because of my girlfriend. I tied her to the radiator and told her every day that I loved her. She hasn't left my side since. Yeah, yeah romance. But the doctors say it's more than that. To cure me, I get electroshocks and I'm promised the moon in the sky. It's a wonderful treatment. It hurts a little, but it works. I feel like a different person already. Tomorrow, they'll bring me the moon. But how will she know I love her if I don't tie her to the radiator?

(Translated by Andreea Georgiana Bogdan / 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.