Who Put the Tavern on the Road

Carmen Ecaterina Ciobâca
I have two fathers. One is gentle, with a sad smile at the corner of his mouth. He takes me on his knee and tells me that life is hard. The other has tear-stained eyes, a red nose, and a stumbling walk. When he comes home from the second shift, he can't find the door handle. His clothes reek of sweat and smoke. He tells me to get out of his sight and berates my mother. He says he's been unlucky. Then he throws himself onto the couch and falls into a death-like sleep. I never know which one is coming home. Hey, boy, another round. Today I want to be Dad, so I don't hear Mom crying.

Florin Leșan
... thought he would become rich. People come from afar for salt, to the mine in the neighbouring village, Roth thought. The tavern is on the lumberjacks' path. It's also market day. I'm the only one with such a business in the village. Roth's happiness ended after a few years. The villagers had planned everything. They bribed the gendarme with the mayor's approval. One evening, they pretended to be drunk. They staged a fight, during which they destroyed everything and beat Roth up. He left, no one ever heard from him again and the villagers turned the tavern into the village's first school.

Bogdan Sebastian Burjan
His life path was marked with milestones. At Number 3, walk on two feet. At 5 and 6, it was reading and writing. Or maybe the other way around. At 15, military high school. At 19, aviation school. He missed it. Barely. He said it's fine, artillery will do. Somehow, that's still about flying. At 25, his wife. Wide-hipped. So she could pop out a baby with ease. Kind of like artillery, too. Man of state, uniform, wife, kids, polished shoes. At milestone 50, in bold letters, it said tricks. He stopped. To pee. For the first time in his life, he felt free.

(Translated by Larisa Marta Mreană / 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.