20.01.2025

Lucian Pătru
He held his heart in his hand and looked at it as it lay there so deflated and stained by lies, fear, duplicity, envy and so much more. He glanced over the shoulder and saw a herd of people raking through the glittering muck, relentlessly searching for something. Termites were flowing in his blood, ravenously biting everything in their path. The mud on his cheeks had tried and started to wrinkle his skin. He clenched his fist until a ruby-red drop trickled down, and then he flicked his fingers against the heard. He saw it pulse for the first time, smiled, and then set off.

 Iulia Stavre
The sky against which the helicopter was flying was no longer blue. The sun was barely visible, just a glimmering shadow covered by the smoke and ashes of war. He looked down. The sight was apocalyptic. Stillness. Withered forests, burnt fields, dried rivers. Groups of animals and birds are rotting. Deserted cities, civilization is in ruins. The people caught in the agony of doom in a planet-wide Pompeii. No hope for life. The helicopter landed. God put His gas mask on and descended to ascertain the scale of the disaster.

Ramona Ungureanu
Time's relative, that's all I know from physics class, so the expression: Coming soon can be dilated by heat and become rubbery, so I didn't let his stew cool down on his plate. I waited and waited, and, as night crawled closer I slowly made my way to the cooperative, lest something might have happened to him, the universe is large and full of hurdles, you could break a bone just like that. When I got there I saw him with his head between Lucica's legs. Ah, that was the issue, he was stuck there, poor thing, how scared he must've been. I immediately called the emergency services.

(Translated by Adriana-Maria Botea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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.

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