The last Newspaper

Cristian Palade
Early in the morning, old Timofte went to the kiosk at the corner of the street and asked for Gazeta Sporturilor[1]. He hadn't missed a single issue in the past forty years. He read it with his breakfast, amidst the steam of coffee and cigarette smoke. A daily delight, all his life. Nae, the vendor, told him that this was the last one. From tomorrow, everything would move online. The old man sighed and left, dejected. The next day, at dawn, he opened the cupboard and, from the dust-covered piles of old papers, chose a random newspaper and began to read, amidst the steam of coffee and cigarette smoke.
Florentina Enache
The last few years had been tough. The final assault found them aged, weary, and fed up with the jibes of those who wanted to silence them. After the deal was signed and the last bastion of print journalism was sold, they held their final editorial meeting. Then they wrote with fire in their hearts, while their colleagues printed with tears in their eyes. Friends, that's it; this is all we could do, for now. We enter the post-truth era, good luck with the tabloid, to those who can continue, the editor-in-chief said. Well? they wondered. I have other rods, he smiled.

Elia Ghinescu
The old man remained alone in the cold room. He places the lead types carefully into the frame with tweezers. He pushes his fogged-up glasses up his nose. He ensures that the letters are reversed, mirrored, perfectly aligned. His fingers turn black as he spreads the ink. But he doesn't care; he has to write the last history. The skin on his hands is cracked. The blank sheet of paper gleams strangely. He presses it over the letters. And waits. It is the last night of the century. Tomorrow, AI code XM-9YZ, version 9, will transmit data only to the chips implanted in every living-born human.

(Translated by Ioana Andreea Radu / 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.