Ice Cream

Gheorghiță Mircea
Dressed in his three-stripe tracksuit reserved for weddings, Goguță, the village bowling champion, felt cramped in the cheap coffin. Father Agheasmie, a former teammate, tipsy, tearfully stuttered the funeral rites at the edge of the grave. Goguță eyed him critically through the slit of his half-closed eyelids. I should've given him a rooster, Goguță thought dialectically. Goguța wept conventionally in her kierchief, but in perspective she pondered the meaning of sexual life. When she leaned over the coffin, she pressed her titties deeply towards Goguță, but he remained as cold as a Polar ice cream.

Ramona Ungureanu
I locked myself in the house and for three days I ate puffed corn snacks. How could I have been so wrong, I don't know, I hadn't seen through the idiot. From the couch, a T-shirt of his, crumpled, stared at me with an alien-like expression. Get lost. In front of the door, bouquets of roses were dying peacefully. The phone kept ringing and beeping nonstop. Get lost. The last message made me smile bitterly. What are you doing, Northern Sea, any ice holes, I smell fish. You smell nothing but hell, it's closed season, asshole. And your license has expired for good.

Horațiu Dudău
No one knows where she comes from. She doesn't cry, she doesn't laugh. She overcomes every feeling with a cold premature death sensation. She kills the smile with her mournfully lips with lipstick on, trained to bite into the throat of the day with contractions that hurt more than childbirth. Dressed in black, I sense in her the corpse-like weight of hours that she carries towards dusk with steps resigned to the thought that they may be her last. Between classes, she goes down and buys an ice cream. The night in her eyes fades for a moment and I see the sickness of an unwanted child.

(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.