I write for a Living

Monica Bologa
I am curled up under the blanket and I'm trying to sleep the hunger away. Under my closed eyelids, I'm starting to see images, people and constellations; in my stomach I feel a rat scratching my insides. I'm going to the kitchen; I open the fridge- void. I sit at my desk and I begin to write. One page, two, ten pages. Words after words, thoughts after thoughts, they gather on a paper plate. I'm satisfied only after the last dot. Tomorrow at lunch, I'm going to nurture myself with another story, one about love. Then I'm going to my mother's to eat a soup.

Ana-Maria Butuza
I am curled up under the blanket and I'm trying to sleep the hunger away. Under my closed eyelids, I'm starting to see images, people and constellations; in my stomach I feel a rat scratching my insides. I'm going to the kitchen; I open the fridge- void. I sit at my desk and I begin to write. One page, two, ten pages. Words after words, thoughts after thoughts, they gather on a paper plate. I'm satisfied only after the last dot. Tomorrow at lunch, I'm going to nurture myself with another story, one about love. Then I'm going to my mother's to eat a soup.

Gheorghiță Mircea
I wrote love stories for the timid, unsure and uninspired people. Since childhood I've been reading romance literature, and when others were playing with the ball, I was browsing in the city's library everything from the ancients to the romantics, classics and moderns, theatre, poetry and novels. Do you remember the collection with the diamond on the cover? How many loves I mediated, I was reading their responses and I prepared the next one. I thought the internet, the emoji ended me. Every now and then, a widower or a divorcee comes along, touches my hump for luck and hands me their phone with the Messenger app.

(Translated by Maria-Ilinca Darie / 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.