The last Newspaper

Bogdan Mihai Bati
They met in kindergarten and fought over all the toys. In elementary school, they argued less. In middle school, Ramona's melons grew under her t-shirt, and Mihai had learned to use his right hand to play with himself. High school brought their first meeting, their first kiss, and their first caresses. University revealed the secrets of the body. It was followed by marriage and their honeymoon. They chose to go to the mountains and visit the cave where they got stuck. Give me the newspaper, Mihai called out from the darkness. It's the last one, and I'll need to wipe myself too.

Florentin Sorescu
I met him at the traffic light. Back then, he came to me with a newspaper and asked me to roll down the window. It costs only two lei[1], he said, pleading. I'm not surprised, I replied, what can a two-lei newspaper do? In the following days, I didn't even bother to roll down the window; what would be the point of freezing for nothing? After that, I didn't see him again. That is, until I spotted his picture on a billboard under a headline barely visible: Homeless man dies from hypothermic shock after last night's freeze. He was found in the park under a pile of newspapers.
Dana Popescu
He had distributed all the newspapers and was slowly making his way home when he saw her. Enchanted by the beauty and delicacy she possessed, which he was unaccustomed to, he had no peace until the young teacher assigned to the village school said "yes" to him at the town hall. They raised children together, he continued his studies, but he could never shake the feeling of being inferior. So he began wasting his days with drinking buddies, while she patiently waited for him in the house they had built together. Illness had long since taken away our father, but our mother still waits for his last newspaper.

(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.