Glasses

Carmen Stanciu
The train braked easily and stretched out on the platform. She dragged her noisy suitcase in a hurry over the ground filled by holes. The station was the same but something was different. She arrived home in a taxi driven by a former revolutionary. The whole way home he told her about the revolution, a real thriller with street fights. Tired, she turned on the light in the abandoned house, her parents had moved to Bucharest. The father had Alzheimer's and the mother had forgotten her glasses on the dusty bookshelf where they stared at her awkwardly. The house without her parents has the air of an orphaned child.

Sanda Burță
If I hadn't sent her with my mom to the park, if I had put everything aside and gone with her to see some ducks, if I had gotten to the hospital sooner, if I had been able to look at her little body before they put the cover on. If. If it's a damned worm gnawing at you from inside, gnawing everything that was good and warm and clean, gnawing until there's nothing left inside you but pain and hate. I burn the clothes, the toys, the pictures of her. I keep only her pink sunglasses. If I had the guts, I'd swallow this fistful of pills.

Florina Hegedüs
The road that started from in front of the gate comes to an abrupt halt at the bottom of the hill, proud-green and tall. For half of his life,Linu kept climbing it, kept sliding back. In the second half of his life, one morning, Linu woke up feeling wise, he was going to go around it, he had to see the framed wonders from far, far away. He walked round and round the hill and arrived still at the gate. The grass looked at him scoldingly through dewy lenses. He fried eggs with slices of porridge, threw grain to the chickens and sat down under the walnut tree to sing. About him, that he's daftly stupid.

(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.