Freckles

Sanda Burță
When you're a resident doctor, your diet and sleep are all snatchy, the girls are practically non-existent. You don't walk away from any emergency room or experience. You study. That night, I fell in love. She had long hair and a freckle on the tip of her nose. Cerebral death. Liver, pancreas, lungs, kidneys, heart. In that order. The eagles left. I ran into the yard and threw up. The next day I read in the newspapers: Wanda Wollanski, 22 years old, her organs saved 6 lives. I throw up again. It's been years since then. Have I gotten over it? Of course. I got married, I have a little girl. Her name is Wanda.

Marilena Demian
The commotion and giggles were afloat. Only he remained unmoved, fixing the blank piece of paper with his eyes. Whenever someone tried catching a look at what he was doing, he would cover it with his hand. The black pencil began moving slowly on the drawing paper and he barely handed it to the teacher, at the last moment. The next day, his dad was called to school. Look at what Radu drew as his mother's face for his homework. A long oval, shaky, no strands of hair, two big black circles, an arched line at the bottom and thousands of dots. Yeah, that's his mother, before she passed away. She had freckles.

Magdalena Daminescu
It wasn't enough that my entire life I struggled to hide my freckles, now I have to fight wrinkles as well. I tried everything, even donkey milk, nothing worked. My freckles slid into the deep creases especially when I laughed, it's like they raced to see which one would go into the hill and which one would go into the valley. They had the most fun when I laughed at myself, they hid into the crow's feet near my eyes. But in the end, I was rewarded, the wrinkle fashion arrived, if you don't have them, make them yourself. The teenagers are crazy about freckles. I'm waiting for the wrinkle fashion to come.

(Translated by Laurențiu-Gabriel Niculae / 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.