Overpopulation

Alina Ilie
She looked at her fingers with the kind of panic you experience when you take candy from a bowl, not knowing if they were free or if you've just stolen them. She tried, unsuccessfully, to shove them into her pockets which were crammed with junk: gum, coins, car keys, the keychain for the house keys, a few receipts, some losing lottery tickets and two 10 lei bills crumpled almost beyond recognition. Then, it occurred to her that not everyone has perfect nails so she tugged at her ring finger's cuticle with her teeth and the thin trail of blood complemented her outfit perfectly.

Gheorghiță Mircea
Yes, it was crowded. We kept brushing up against one another but that wasn't the most annoying part. It's true, there were odours, there was the rubbing up against each other but, somehow, this crowdedness held the solution to the problem within itself. Many of those forced into permanent contact developed this strange allergy, this overcrowding and total intimate proximity resulted, in the end, in the reflex to kill one's neighbour. Suffocated by the breath of coexistence and life in close proximity to copies of our own selves, we finally managed to truly despise each other.

Ioana-Ruxandra Rămureanu
On St. Mary's Day, the flowers are white and yellow. Two dark crows are pecking at my temples, wanting to escape, but where to? We've arrived. Our place. They're all here, all warm, and I count them in my head. Yes, there's room for him too. They're arranged according to plan, just right. I plant chrysanthemums in her favourite colours, it looks beautiful. He brings me water from the fountain. A white bird sits beside me on the bench. We share a moment. It's a sweltering day. There's dirt under my nails. The godparents, my dear godparents are here too. Dad caresses the stone, I caress the photo, and we light candles for them.

(Translated by Bogdan Nicola / 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 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.