Skull

Ionuț Morariu
He made cases out of his enemies' skulls. Brain cases. He decorated them with gold foil and diamonds and he exposed them at his family's art gallery. Merely decorative. Art for art's sake. He never signed his name on them. It was his way of being humble when he was coming home from the society. God creates, man decorates, he used to say to his children and then he would withdraw in his studio. Shuddered by the beauty of the macabre dance on the simeze[1], the police officer who cuffed him mumbled. Soli Deo Gloria.
Alexandra Buhudini
I do not know how we are going to get through this winter. The little one is big now and his stomach does not know what empty means. The fall into emptiness, the feeling of emptiness, these mountains empty of their vegetation, these places empty of any flocks. He pressed her to his breast. Her feathers were tucking in his, where her peace had been engraved without relation to time. Mommy, mommy, I found a sheep sku-sku-skull. The little one rushed into the nest with his whole recently winged. Ana. Ana. Wake up. Let us continue the lesson, children, about aegypius monachus, the endangered mountain God.

Andreea Mihaela Murariu Moldovanu
Weakling is what they used to call me and then they were running away. I was a little bit older than 9. Everything was too big for me. Tall and slim, I used to put my backpack over my loneliness coat, 2 sizes bigger, and went to school crying. Nourish your mind and you'll be just fine. My mom encouraged me and I was struggling to eat as much as I could to gain some weight. One day, I found a skull drawing on my desk and the message: I am hungry. I burst into a hysterical laugh and since then I was fine. I got the next skull drawing only when I turned 18. Signed: your sister.

(Translated by Diana Sitaru / 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.