Who Put the Tavern on the Road

Monica Bologa
I had bumped so hard into this boozer, I brutally fell over a wooden chair, my legs stopped listening to me completely, I think my boots had cement inside them, I called for the owner to scold him for his lack of empathy towards the people being gathered left and right from ditches, it's not right, I told him, to distract us from our affairs with this drinking establishment that has brought trouble into homes, many divorces, and other disasters. Do something about it, I told him. Now, they're paving the seven paths in the village.[1]
Horațiu Dudău
I step out of my building, quickly enter the bar on the corner, I order coffee with brandy, chug it in a flash, I stop a taxi, I arrive at the train station, get a whisky to help me warm up until the train comes, get into the dining car to cool off with a beer, I arrive at the airport, have a beer to muster up some courage, the plane is on time, I have some whisky again to get over my fear of flying, I get off at my destination in one piece, celebrate with a beer, I ask for another to realize I'm on vacation, find the hotel, slurp up some liqueur down at the bar, then I leave on a quest to find a pub.

Caterina Tudorache
Overnight, Mișu woke up as the mayor lady's man-wife. An esteemed handler at the egg factory, he was no longer cut out to be just anyone. With the right pen and through a twist of fate, his wife anointed him Head of Urban Planning. In the first meeting, as a representative of a desperate people, Mișu stuck 5 pushpins on the map: one at the school, one at the store, one at the town hall, and 2 near his house. Refused with a broomstick over the nape, Mișu felt betrayed and quit. The pushpins turned into parks, which caused chronic unhappiness throughout the whole village.

(Translated by Andreea-Nicoleta Ban / 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 July 2024, the group has 13,200 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.