Hopless, Oblivious People and Their Journals

Sonia Ungureanu
Summer holiday, day 40. May death forget all about you. That's what my grandma would angrily wish upon me a few times a day. Yesterday I forgot to let the ducks out of their coop, I mean who was to hear them quacking, not me - I was reading in my room. Today I forgot to throw water in the stay for the sow to get all muddy, she was squealing her hooves out. There's no hope for you. My grandma foresees a dark fate for me. She knows I'll forget home my books, my notebooks, my homework, even my head. Now I have to hide the journal back under the rug, if she finds it and has some sort of revelation, she'll give me a sermon I won't be able to ever forget.

Siranuș Hakobian
It'll pass, it's just some temporary amnesia; read your journal, so you can remember who you are. The doctor was right - I did have a journal and I started reading it. It was written in there that I like crème brûlée, to ski all winter and that I am madly in love with Ana, a colleague from work. Perhaps I'm stuck in the middle of some conspiracy, and the doctor is Big Satan: it's clear that I don't like snow and that I totally love Dora, the neuro nurse. And now, come one, who would eat that crème brûlée thing?

Andra Toropoc
I don't know, I don't remember, I don't know them, he was fiercely uttering the words to the guards. Ah, so our philosopher is still amnesic, the big brutes in uniforms said, smirking, let us help you remember, while you take these few punches for your smarty friends. They mercilessly beat him up until they got tired and he remained inert. When they poked him with the tip of their shoes, he whispered something to them. You jackass, go ahead and tell your mom about this stuff about freedom and forgiveness when she'll come to pick up your notebooks and clothes and maybe your corpse. You make me wanna drop something steaming hot on your happiness, you dumbass.

(Translated by Cristina-Paula Grosu / 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 November 2024, the group has 13,480 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.