Glasses

Cristian Nedelcu
He was my best friend. We knew each other since we were kids. May he rest in peace. He was my brother, my confidant, we knew everything about each other. When I didn't get into college but I told my parents I did, he knew. He also knew when I spent my tuition money on booze, after all, we drank it together. I got married, he was my best man. Then for a while, I never heard from him. Until the day he told me he and my wife had been together since the wedding. I told him: I don't think you'll be alright.

Nicolae Popescu
 Grandma used to put a blanket under the mulberries trees. We'd sit on our butts, with me between her legs and we'd open the book. It smelled like alfalfa. You feed the chickens, I fed the cows, Grandpa said. Not now, old man, it's reading time. She'd say read with piety, like she was praying. I'd look up when she'd stop and urge her to go on. She put her glasses on her nose. One arm of the glasses was glued with a band-aid, the left lens a little cracked. She'd read to me, every night a story. The glasses didn't die, neither did grandma. The little one is screaming: Daddy, come on, it's reading time.  

Roxana Catana Tarhon
I didn't like the High Schoolers[1] film. A guy, some say, nice but a bit childish, is circling a girl with some flower. Yeah, man, a flower; not expensive jewellery; not tickets to electric festivals, no - one single flower. And she gets all excited; as if she received a million euros. But she doesn't give the little guy anything. There's something mysterious when the chick starts skipping class. You start thinking - she's pregnant; she's smoked something and has no more money; she wants to run away; in short, something spicy. But no - you find out later she was near-sighted.
(Translated by Cristina Ioana Bontea / 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 September 2024, the group has 13,320 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.