Death Comes to the Slots

Dan Banu
I won't spend too much time at the slots. That's what I promised Gălușcuța[1]. I change a hundred, take the chips, and play until they're gone. Just yesterday it got stretched. The dough vanished, reappeared, vanished, reappeared, until I got two cherries. I hadn't gotten cherries in a while, and I thought I'd stack up the cash if I got the third one. But it was a nose. Then five fingers entered, two ears, nothing, then three of them. When the lips entered, the owner stopped me, saying, Wait, that's Gicuță, I think the machine ate him last night.
Cristian Palade
He often had dizzy spells. He did all sorts of tests, but he couldn't figure out the cause of his illness. One day, in the middle of a vertigo attack, wanting to go into a pharmacy, he mistook it and immediately entered a nearby place, to the slot machines. By instinct, he put in a few coins and started playing. Ding, ding, ding, a few times, and the vertigo disappeared. Hah, he thought, got you good. From then on, any vertigo was treated successfully at the slot machines. He was 125 years old and began to believe he was immortal. One day, Death, wanting to enter a pharmacy, mistook it and immediately walked into the one next door, to the slot machines.

Iulia Biro
Tokens clutched in her palm, she sat down, exhausted, in front of the machine. She saw no other solution. Maybe she'd get lucky, like in the old days. Business had been really bad this year, she hadn't received a quarter of the work she got last year. She kept waiting for the harvest season, to have something to boast about to the Boss. The worst of misfortunes happened: yesterday her sickle broke, just when she had a few spots left. Now she hoped to get some money to buy another one quickly, so she wouldn't let the Devil take everything that could be reaped from the earth.

(Translated by Bogdan Macarie / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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.