I Donate My Body to Science

Marian Bircea
I know professors who teach at the world's most prestigious universities. I know scientists who work for the world's most powerful institutes. I know doctors who perform surgeries at the world's most renowned hospitals. I know artists who perform on the world's most famous stages. I know engineers who work for the world's top corporations. The wealth of a country is its elite, the science body. The Romania of manele[1] singers, the country of the illiterate zealots, the country of the small-time crooks, it gave up on the elite. It has foolishly donated its body to science.
Florentina Ghițescu
It's for the students so they may have learning material. I'll never forget going to the cemetery with my group mates to get bones from the mass grave. Armed with a bottle of palinka from some guy from Buzău, we knew we would succeed. The watchman opened the door to some sort of basement. We found all sorts of stuff there. A real catch was a nylon sock in which all the foot bones were preserved. The keeper did not expect us to really leave with a full sack -that wasn't our deal, boys. I hope to live a long time, I don't want to be a pretty corpse.

Andra Toropoc
Terente escaped, what violent thrills. I flinch and wake up in a puddle of sweat from the nerves. I found out there are many candidates, and since then I haven't been sleeping well. Nor have I been able to train, and we know work maintains the organ. I take supplements and hope I can take the vacant spot in the jar. Well, a part of me. My CV is good, my famous tattoo is visible, and my references are ok. My dream is to be in a museum. My time for glory is now. I'm useless at physics and Einstein's brain hasn't gone missing, anyway.

(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.