Skull

Răzvan Dițescu
The air around the meadow is full of a sour, rotting smell. The contrast between the white skull and its shadow is striking. The landscape is macabre. Dark and Empty eyeholes are staring blankly searching for answers into the abys of forgetfulness. Worms are crawling with sinister movements, leaving behind wet, glossy trails. In the basement of the Forensic Medicine Institution, on the corridor, in the dim light of one bulb, two parents are waiting for the test results. They already know it's her. Her clothes don't lie. The DNA test can only confirm what they already knew: they finally found her.

Florina Hegedüs
I follow the gatekeeper's advice at the University. After the art-gallery, first door just around the corner. The door on the left or the one on the right? I press a random door handle. Shelves. Covered by spider webs, which look like drapes. I get closer and wipe the sticky table with my finger. There are many skulls, which one by one turn towards me and seem to absorb me into their empty sockets. I don't know how much time I have spent there. But I got out, quick as an arrow, passing by the gatekeeper. At home I fall into a deep sleep. I wake up in almost complete silence. I wash my face. The water glides on the fleshless bone.

David Brescan
Grandfather got drunk again and couldn't get out of the cellar. When I went down on the shaky stairs to get him out, he was singing a song from wartime. He was silent for a moment, when he saw me. I'll show you something, grandson, and he rolled a wine barrel, then he pulled away a few bricks and put his hand into the hole in the wall, to take out a gun and a skull. This is the gun I shot the Russian with, the one who dishonoured your grandmother, after the war, and this is his skull. I fed the pigs with the rest of it.

(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.