The last Newspaper

Cristina Daniela Dumitru-Pascal
She only knew the hallways and rooms of the orphanage. She was little when she started stealing the newspaper from the director's office and taking it to the cook to read it to her. Only various purchases, auntie, maybe some family would want to "buy" a little girl. Nothing ever came up, and the building echoed with her laughter and singing: This is my world; I'm not leaving here, this is it. One day, she entered the kitchen with the newspaper. This is the last one, auntie. Have you found your parents, you little rascal? Nooo. I've turned eighteen and I'm leaving the orphanage. You were the only one for me.

Andra Toropoc
In the war, he stayed in the trenches, but the cold he endured during winters in his village house was unmatched. Spared by weapons and disease, he had grown old and lonely. He no longer had firewood, just some old newspapers. From under the blanket, he could hear the howl of the blizzard and could almost see his comrades huddled together to survive, stuffing newspapers in their boots so their feet wouldn't freeze. And if death claimed one of them, they'd say he had used the wrong page-the one with the obituary. When he fell asleep, the last scraps of paper had long stopped smouldering in the stove.

George Dometi
Someone once told me, and I quote: Stop with the revue-like journalism because, even though you seem to embody the whimsicality of a juicy, zany, and sugary journalism, you're not the only one suffering. You melancholic unipolar man, what relevance does the exhaustive dimension of death's theme hold? he asked. I get that you can't get enough of the drama of neuroendocrine, but come on, boy, throw in a joke, a jest, a sketch, a skit with a lizard, something bright and aurora borealis-like. Let us feel good while flipping through your work. It's not vanity. It's the last one.

(Translated by Andreea Maria Liceanu / 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 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.