The Star without a Name

Caterina Tudorache
So in The Lucky Mill it's about some people who, as soon as they went in there, how they got lucky. The word "mill" takes me to Mona, from a book I'm reading now. I'm so hot on the story, I never thought I was such a romantic. How can you see a girl, like her, like everything about her, have her stay at your place and you nothing. You name a star. Nuts. What, girls want stars? Mona. Seriously, if I ever meet a hot girl with that name, I'm gonna go around her. So that astronaut had no luck. He should've stopped by the mill.

Alina Ilie
In the old granny's embroidered ia[1] you could have sworn she was a doll. But don't miss a fence or a cherry tree. That's when they told her a boy was to be born. She'd laugh and run to the roof and start singing. And she sang Mirabela[2]'s and Angela Similea[3]'s songs until the moon grew as big as her love of music. The neighbours listened and advised her parents to make her an artist, only they didn't dream of her starving to death. So she became an accountant, but I know my mom would have been a star. I know because she sang to me, too.
Adina Colțea
We all have a star somewhere in the universe, that's where all our dreams and desires go and wait for the right time to come back on the path, the nanny told him that cloudy night. The kid was still thinking long after the other children had fallen asleep. He sat with his elbows on the window looking out beyond the clouds for stars. At dawn he missed his roll call. Somewhere out in the sands, a stray aviator met a shaggy-haired boy who asked him to draw him a picture of a sheep.

(Translated by Victor Albei / 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.