Skull

Tina Dublea
Please, God, make me a shellfish or at least a baby fly. I used this "fly" because I couldn't find a better rhyme. Why are you laughing? Please, look at the dear jellyfish, the way they survived without a brain for hundreds of millions of years. This fact gives me hope and a little bit of confidence in our own strength, it makes me think that we can continue watching trouble island[1] and listening to manele[2] and killing each other in the name of some invented gods and still, we are going to propel into the future without nothing in our skull, just spitting venom out of our mouth. Aurelian Țolescu
When I was a child, my grandfather used to put the pig skull on the roof of the storehouse and left it there, in the sunlight. Once, during the summer holiday, while running around with my vehicle, a metal hoop driven with a bent wire, I fell and cut myself really bad on a shard. Panic and pain around the court. Grandma and the gipsy women we're trying to make the bleeding stop and we're making plans about taking me to the town, to have somebody stich my wound. My grandpa came with the pig skull, scooped inside it a little bit, took out a black ointment and smeared the wound. The following day my wound was barely visible. Today we have Cicatridin[1]. Andra Toropoc
It's unknown who recuperated it from the mud, because people we're looking at the body that was shaking, having death's shivers. It appeared one night plunged into a stake, the rain had washed away the blood and smoothed its blonde curls. They spitted into the bulging eyes, they scraped the cheeks and put mockingly a dung crown on it. The crows completed the whole work, until all that remained was a white skull. Nobody knows when it was placed in the crypt with the dolphin drawing on it, but everybody is convinced that during full moon, curls of fog come out of that place and all around there is a smell of cozonac[1].
(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.