A Lucky Coin

David Brescan
During a foggy night, at the crossroads, the Devil was jumping up and down on his goat's feet because of the cold, on the lookout for lost souls coming from the village pub. Towards morning he wrapped his tail around himself and went home, near the boilers, in a warm place. In the bathroom mirror he saw that, bloody hell, he was missing an eye.[1] Whoever finds it, may my luck have, I'm not going back after it. The following day: Teacher, look what I found on the way. A yellow penny. It's lucky. I will open a bank with it. The teacher: Stop talking without being called, Țiriac Ion[2].
Marius Stan
She is as beautiful as only in a dream an angel can appear. I look at her and thus my instincts spur. [1]She bends down to take something from the sidewalk or maybe just to spite me with her miraculous body. Ok, she found a coin. She examines it carefully, maybe it's something valuable from the time of The Roman Empire or at least from the time of King Michael. She turns it on one side and then on the other just as I would like to turn her in bed. She goes to put it in her pocket but she has no pockets. She doesn't even have a bag. So she puts the coin in her bosom, between her two melons.
Oana Brumă
During 11th grade, she left the country for the first time and flew to Rome. Roman vestiges, fine perfumes and gorgeous leather shoes. She was part of the national team and was participating in an international Olympiad. Perhaps because she was small and not very talkative, they didn't take her too seriously. Even the teacher used to tell her that her role there was to smile and distract the attention of the Italian contestants. But all hell broke loose at the awards ceremony. Only she won an award for Romania. It must have been thanks to the thrown into the Trevi Fountain.

(Translated by Oana-Elena Dragnea / 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 June 2024, the group has 13,100 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, Monica Aldea, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.