My Uncle

Georgiana Gabriela Fodor
He had come from abroad in an UFO, with hundreds of dollars, perfumes and a bright smile. Everything was laying like a balm over the dust, the torn trousers, the shining poverty, the heavy tears of the parents. And my first perfume, Eternity. Grandma also flew in his UFO, then landed with many packages. When I learnt the letters, I knew how to read Tarom company. And With the plane. And Toronto. And Montreal. My uncle tried to stop the Cold War between the other uncles, but the iron curtain remained still for an eternity.

Andra Toropoc
From him I learnt that you can steal the Sun. That's how he was used to say when I was returning all taned from the seaside. I found out about Balchik and a queen who was feeding him candies back in his childhood there. Through his Tatar eyes, that I also had from my grandmother, I could see those places, with an uncontainable longing like restless waves. Later I searched for my origins that he was talking about and I had sent him photographs with traces of his memories. In the envelope I put some sand burnt by the sun from the. I knew that he would understand and that he would smile witty under his mustache.

Ina Moldoveanu
With him I first had a conversation in French and found out about the history of many countries. He was speaking about Algeria a little, his homeland, and how he had separated himself from his sixteen brothers. France was his adoptive country, Germany his second motherland. He was a staunch Muslim although he was keeping it as a secret. He would never pick up a nut that had fallen before a gate, until he left a penny there. Being sick, he stayed away from my aunt, because knowing her way, he could have seen himself buried in an Orthodox cemetery, with priests and alms. And she, ready to unbury him out of spite, just to put the cross at his head.

(Translated by Constantin Grigorescu / 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.