Picture of the Year

Carmen-Ecaterina Ciobâcă
Year 1976. Someone's here to see you, the homeroom teacher told me. Auntie Țuca and Dad. When we got home, we all sat on one side in the guest's room. Me at one end, next to me my grandmother, straight as a pole, my grandfather who had grown a beard, Vali who had also come back from high school, Nae with a shirt too big for him, the sisters who had put on a headscarf: Liza the blond one, already a young lady, Maria with a dress buttoned up to the neck, Ania who had just turned eight. At the end of the line was Dad. He had taken Gicu in his arms to see better. Lying in front of us, Mom seemed to be asleep.

Cristian Nedelcu
He didn't have much with him, just a backpack in which he had stuffed some clothes, two packs of tobacco and the silver cross. He arrived at the hostel at dusk. The landlady, a morose old woman, showed him to the door of his room. A bed, a table, a chair, a cupboard. Above the bed, a photograph of a woman not very young, but nevertheless beautiful. January, 1907, he could read in the lower right-hand corner. As he arranged his things, he had the feeling that someone was watching him. Eh, fatigue, he said aloud. For a moment, the woman in the photograph depicted a sadistic smile.

Cecilia Fofiu
I was looking for some shoes when she appeared, diaphanous. Blue eyes, cherry mouth. I'm Lucica, what can I do for you, she smiles at me giddily. I grin like a fool, trying the shoes on, when she asks me, what I do for a living? I'm an electrician, I install sockets and photograph cables, I answer humbly. Cables she says being surprised, and are you good at it? Yes, I answer, the boss is pleased. Can we meet to take my portfolio photo for a beauty contest? Terrified by the prospect, we settled the location and that year I became a real man. With a wife and twins.

(Translated by Adela Neacșu / 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.