At Your Window, Late

Florina Hegedüs
It's a game. Me, him, we are neighbours. With natural routine, we smile at each other if we cross paths. I like him, even though, when he busies himself around the yard, he seems preoccupied, hurried, distant. Like a solitary tree. I imagine myself as a butterfly brushing against his leaves. He always slips red roses to me through the slats of the fence. In the evenings, I watch the window where he reads until dawn, and I caress him in my thoughts. His presence has become my psychological anchor. Today, a bulldozer appeared. Finally. There will be a house on the empty lot next door. With a window glowing late into the night.

Ana Ludușan
She's institutionalized with dementia. Fears had haunted her all her life. Now, she rejoices, she, who could never take joy in anything, ever. Late at night, she sits by the window and recites verses from Rilke. She learned them in the Russian camp from her nacealnic[1]. Once a week, the guards would burst in and rape them, one by one. When her mother tried to protect her, they smashed her skull. For a long time, he knew nothing of her, but he learned she had a nacealnic who shielded her, brought her flowers, and recited Rilke to her. She waits for him every night.
Vlad Mușat
An old woman was trying to stand up, cursing the sky all the while. It was 30 degrees in the place I had stumbled upon by chance, and I couldn't understand how a massive layer of ice had formed. I helped her up and stayed there, on my knees. The old woman told me to curse the woman who sometimes came out to flick her cigarette ashes from the window. In winter, the kids in the neighborhood would stick carrots on my nose and laugh. Only the dogs licked me, night after night, so I wouldn't freeze. No, I couldn't curse her. Years later, they built a pet cemetery over me.

(Translated by Andreea Sorana Oltean / 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 December 2024, the group has 13,540 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.