Ice Cream

Monica Ciurea
I hadn't even finished first grade, yet the summer time had invaded the slums. Mother says I am a young lady now and I should wear the dress she wore in her youth, vanilla with chocolate flavoured. Here we all wear thrown-away clothes. Only the man in the tweed costume doesn't seem to belong there. What a beautiful and smart lady you are, he addressed me politely. Would you like me to teach you English? and he dragged me towards him. Ice cream and he offers me an ice cream. Ice cream. I can feel the taste of the vanilla with chocolate on my tongue; I'm trembling and the palm under my dress, cold, between, nooo. I scream. I scream.

Cristian Nedelcu
It was unbearably hot. He would've turned on the air conditioner, but they cut off his electricity. He lost his job, his wife took the children and left him, and now on top of it all he got a notice from the bank. In maximum three days he had to evacuate the apartment. That was the last straw for him. He wiped the sweat off of his forehead, took a deep breath and jumped off of the seventh floor. He woke up on the heated asphalt, without any scratch. Across the way, on the little bench beside the ice cream stall, there was death licking a waffle chocolate ice cream.

Ionuț Morariu
There was a smell of cheap soap and sadness. Only when she got up from the bed, I saw her for who she really was. It was her. The saddest girl in the world. I would've liked to hold her hand. I wanted to stop her and take a picture. Then I remembered. There isn't a shutter for unhappiness. Because no one photographs and neither feels the pain of the other. Nonetheless, I had to say something to her. Enjoy the days of your sadness. Anything. I kept silent. I put my pants on and shut the door behind me. On the street I bought a fortune ice cream. It was bitter.

(Translated by Maria-Ilinca Darie / 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.