When Life Gives You Watermelons

Carmen Moldovan
Honey, how was Bucharest? Well, I sold only one bag of watermelons, I left the rest at the market because they were overripe. I outstayed my welcome, you know. Our daughter has married a fine man. There on the porch, he found himself recalling what happened. Sweet watermelons with dark green rind, neither too small nor too big, just perfect. They kept you well fed and hydrated. He'd sold them all, to the last one. The night before he returned, there on the floor where he'd chosen to sleep, he'd felt his son-in-law finding his way in the dark, picking his chest pocket and taking all the money.

Dana Popescu
When they took his forest lands my grandfather hadn't said a word, he'd told my grandmother: Leave them be, Ana, they would have stolen them anyway, let others stay warm, you are enough for me to stay warm. Not even when they took his house with the porch where he had raised his 7 children, did he say a word. He told his kids that the guys who ran the village needed the 4 rooms more than they did, the 4 rooms that he had taken care of until then. But when they wouldn't allow my mother to go to college, because she was of unsound parentage, he took the hatchet to the town hall that had been his home.

Marian Bircea
You, Eve, my girl, what did you need apples for? Didn't I make you beautiful? I did. Oh, is that why you made Adam lose his mind? Adam, why didn't you pay attention? You kept ogling Eve while she was climbing that tree, instead of guarding the garden. What's the matter with you? Can't you talk? Haha, you've been burned, right? How do you like them apples? You asshole. The damn angels have gone and taken all the fruit. Get out of heaven, Eve, if I had made watermelons be the forbidden fruit..., do you get my drift? By now, Adam would have been dead, and I'd have had all the TV stations hot on my trail.

(Translated by Mihaela Stănilescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by dr. Nadina Vișan, edited 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.