The Moon in the Sky

Ionuț Tuhoarcă
At an anonymous meeting for anonymous writers, in Pașcani. That's where I met Geta. She's a local, moved away because of work. I suddenly fell in love with her and her with me. We had common interests. I painted and she drew. I would be her model, and she mine. In the evening we would secretly tell each other poems. We wanted kids, but it wasn't meant to be. One night she told me she wanted to be with someone else. It shocked me. She got married to Gelu a month later, he's a truck driver. They have a herd of children.

Alexandra Buhudini
was a knick-knack from Pskov, which my grandma always used to glue back together. I used it as a microphone when I was presenting the Telejurnal[1]. It was hard being a field journalist during harsh conditions. If the night caught up to us during our walk, every puddle was mine. I jumped with my lacquered shoes right onto the moon's face as it lowered its selenic gaze upon the dirt in us humans. Calm down, honey, you'll damage both your shoes and microphone. I didn't jump again. From the edge of time, from the edge of a puddle, I see how Granny gives me a selenic smile.
Răzvan Drăgoi
She was in an advanced state from a young age, virgin and bored. When I looked into her eyes, I felt a sudden surge, my amour awakening. Tightly restrained by my underwear around my pride, which made me infamous in the farther slums of the Capital, where I've earned the nickname Virillius Shopenholer, I felt like I could give her the wax on the moon. Only to assuage my audio-visual desires. She smiled my way and told me something akin to Kak tibia zacut. I sat down, it's not like we would do it standing. But she wanted money. She wasn't so virgin.

(Translated by Adriana-Maria Botea / 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 May 2024, the group has 13,000 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.