The last Newspaper

Tudor Voicu
Small, old, with a rocker's moustache and a longing for his family in Craiova, Uncle Aurică is the only one who doesn't laugh at me for having finished high school and working on a construction site. Today, we dug a trench together, as if we were digging our own graves. You're like a son to me, he says during the lunch break, then offers me a long red LM cigarette and opens Cotidianul newspaper. He reads it seriously, as if it were the Bible, and smokes without taking the cigarette out of his mouth. Hey, that's last week's issue, I tell him. I know, but it's the last one, Uncle Aurică replies. Now it's only published online.

Mona Zelenco
After 35 years, she flips through the newspaper her parents had kept with devotion. She was the star of those fiery days, days of sorrow, agony, and ecstasy-days when death was defied, and hope became certainty. She was born in that chaos. Her birth cry was Freedom. Victoria reads the article about herself with emotion: The Child of the Revolution. On the following pages, printed with vowels of tears and consonants of blood, are the names of those lost in the shadows of those days. Their families also keep the last newspaper.

Alina Ilie
The sun rose for the last time, though no one knew it. Everyone went about their hurried lives. The baker had already taken the first batch of sourdough bread out of the oven and was rushing to knead the second round of dough. The first traffic jam at the intersection brought the usual string of curses. A dishevelled man walked his Pekingese dog. Children, hastily tying their shoelaces, clung to the adults who almost flew them to school. Evenimentul newspaper was already on the stands. The front page announced the new president-11 lei[1], the last issue.
(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.