My Uncle

Alexandra Buhudini
Old Hermulai was a Lipovan. His hands were like two rumpled newspaper and the lead on them seemed to have life left to write under his fingernails. Or was it clod and not lead? He used to pray to the land after he had worked on it, and lest the land be alone, he would bring it some fowls and a fleecy dog. He loved me and used to show me how the sun hides behind the hills. He would count the moles on my face, with his hand on which he had a verviță[1] from which he would smell of myrrh and grass. He used to say that the tallest blade of grass would be the first to be cut by the scythe. So be humble.
Marius Stan
His name was Nicolae Nicolae. Yes, grandparents couldn't find another name. Or maybe the notary was drunk and registered it wrong. He was a kind and wise man. He would come unannounced to our house and knock loudly on the door. We would be first scared, then happy. He'd be dressed in a suit and bring us fondant candies. Sometimes he would take me aside and tell me stories from my grandparents' village, Borănești. Half of the villagers were Romanians, half gypsies. I loved him because one day he told me: My boy, you'll get so far. We'll look at you through the fence.

Fabiola Stoi
 I arrive at the airport, it's so good that everything works well. The country house project is going according to plan. My uncle, an expert builder in Italy, long established in the Americas, who came to the country on holiday, has remained in charge of the works on the cottage outside Bucharest. I left him money and a car and ran away to the beach. Now I'm walking to the plane and breathe in the imaginary Mediterranean air when the phone rings. It's a villager: How do you do! I just pulled your uncle out of the ditch with my Dacia car, he drunk some plum brandy with the neighbour. And he wanted to leave. Just so you know.

(Translated by Florina Georgiana Țîncu / 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.