Skull

Paul Dârvariu
Do you say you have troubles with your memory? You are very lucky. I have just received a performant scanner. We are going to stick those four electrodes on your skull and we are going to find out what is the matter. Aha, it is exactly as I expected: your memory is overburdened with information, memories and images. Sit in front of the monitor. We are going to decide together which ones to erase. I say we start with that big smile, Doc'. We will continue with those blue eyes, with those dimples on the cheeks and with the anatomic details that come after that.

Gladiola Chete
Since I was a child she told me to be more playful, to let them take me by the hand and then to pretend I was frightened. I cannot do it, Ileana. It is clear that we do not have the same mother. It's clear, It's clear, but when I find him, you must stay away because otherwise I will eat your eyes. After she took my hand, Ileana swore she would not even throw a look at him. When I saw them together, they apologized to me and I apologized to them. They found me months after that, at the margins of the woods, singing Ileana, your eyes are black, with her head in my arms. I did not know what to tell them, where the rest of it was. About the eyes, they did not even ask.

Ana Maria Dobre-Nir
The woman was stepping through the ashes of a ruined future, with the sun lowered to an empty shadow. The Earth, now deserted, was covered by ruins that spread like an old scar. In the depths of a dark cave, with her heart beating wildly, she found a strange but terribly familiar skull. Her hand was shaking when she touched it, recognizing the contour of her own life. The echo of this end was resonating through the heavy silence around, and the time was collapsing. The encounter with her own death brought her a bitter revelation. Her future had always been a prison.

(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.