Sakura

Fabiola Stoi
He shut his eyelid over the world and opened his eyes. Inside. The darkness dazzled him, but he remained still, staring into the darkness, until he was starting to discern something. A tree, a house and a child. He had done them all, and they were all successfully done. A whole village sprang from the house, offspring sprang from the child, orchards spread over the hills from the tree. As evening breezes fell, he grasped a blossoming branch. Joy and peace. The latch of the window broke the stillness of the evening: Supper, kulak dog. Tomorrow, we'll bring you another companion.

Andra Toropoc
My neighbour was marrying a Japanese man who was late for the wedding, presumably spooked by the bride. The crazy woman had made a carpet of petals on the staircase and invited the whole block to the party, but she was left high and dry. What's worse is that, she'd painted her bichon pink and it began to bark whenever it saw its reflection in the mirror. Out of hysteria, it ate the seaweed off the platters and now made little sushi everywhere. But it wasn't until the bridegroom arrived that the typhoon started in Nagasaki, for the unfortunate man confessed that he already had a wife and children at home.

Bogdan Sebastian Burjan
Out of the grey sky of the silent, dark night came Sakura. She wore an ancient black robe. Fine silk. All you could see were her eyes. They shone only when the moon touched them with its cold rays. And she shook a petal in the shadow of the night. A pale, deceptive pink. A silent wind carried away on its notes each torn petal. A song with no notes. A carpet of fading petals beneath the grey night sky. From his seiz, the old samurai gazed into her eyes. Ephemeral, she whispered. The next day the sun never rose. There was only ash. 1945.

(Translated by Andreea Georgiana Bogdan / 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.