Mission: Impossible

Camil Popescu
The most beautiful girl in the world is named Felicidad and she works in the confectionery on the main street. Her smile slows down the flow of time, which is why the days spent in G-town are longer than those in the rest of the land, at least 25 hours long, maybe even 30. I spent three days in the city and only one hour in the confectionery, where time seemed not to exist, and the customers stood stone-still. When I could not see her anymore, I woke up as if from a dream. I was young when I entered, and white-haired when I left. How do I turn back time?

Monica Aldea
Climbing was getting tougher. The poet got lost. At least he brought his sleeping gear with him. What beautiful places, he seemed to recognize them. People passed by unseen. Deaf and blind, they were going up and down serenely. A gentle joy filled his soul. He began to murmur a prayer. He found himself saying - the last ones, they will be the last ones. He entered without a trace of fear. They were waiting for him. The doors closed. Someone picked up the book he had been holding tightly all the way and read the title NO EXIT. The poet was already lost in the light. (In memory of Ioan Es Pop).

Diana Cornea
He had stopped kneading the meats. Now he was hitting them straight. He was hanging them on the chandelier every now and then and measured the time according to the slowness of their movements. He was stacking them happily in lively tempo on the frozen shelves. Note after note until today when he noticed it was repeating itself. The musical scale. He cut nervously. Bloody drops appeared on the transparent surface. One eye blinked. With the pen in the air he turned like a conductor - orchestrating a tête à tête winking at it: I'll christen you Il Fiore. They found him bitten, between all the open, hungry mouths.

(Translated by Eliza Radu / 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 August 2024, the group has 13,230 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.