Overpopulation

Elena Fermuș
Flowers were everywhere while the trees kept getting fewer and fewer. For every picked bouquet, she also put a fir branch to better define the forest. She wasn't making a lot of them as she wasn't always selling all of them. People bought fancy bouquets from malls, whilst they avoided her. If only she would have been dressed nicer. But she had the best dress she owned on her; and it was clean, washed with her grandmother's tears. What is cleaner than tears? She didn't mind as she would go to the cemetery with the unsold ones; there were many graves on which flowers forgot to grow and in this way she reminded them about it.

Ina Moldoveanu
How are you doing, you sylphid? How did you survive in this lake? Now my master abandoned me, the one who kept me alive in a plastic box for fifteen years. I have to take you under my protective wing. Now I am free; I have so much space to roam, a lot of friends as well. You're not in the safest environment. But it seems that this is where I was born; this place is where I belong. We are the frogs of Florida. We invaded your territory. We grow big and multiply fast. We will kill you, and then eat you. Live your last moments of freedom; you won't be in much pain.

Horațiu Dudău
The concrete flows like sparkling champagne into the recycled sheathing until rotting. Tied with umbilical cords at their ankles, grandparents trudge towards asylums, wondering how their children get buried alive and how that makes them become parents in their absence. Starved of time, trains are eating at the bowels of the city, carrying the disease of the century into offices, factories, parks, schools and kindergartens. The count is no longer from one to one. It is from a million to another million. As a preventive measure, hospitals are equipped with high-end devices for the next generation.

(Translated by Ioana Bobeanu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 October 2024, the group has 13,400 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.