Jazz

Silvia Ștefan
The first phone call. My heart is pounding, my palms are sweating, my voice is shaking. God, I can barely contain myself. In the background, jazz floats like a warm dream. You're there, in my head, enchanting me with your enigmatic smile. The sounds of the saxophone are creeping through the receivers. All I can pay attention to is your breathing. What were you saying? Every note seems like an unspoken promise, a wish that this night will last forever. It just seems like that. We hang up. We are separately together. I read a story to my son; you make gingerbread with your little ones.

Tina Dublea
I had to find my way around as my parents didn't have any money for a piano, nor for private lessons, canto was out of the question; as I told you before, wasted money. Because the One Above gave me a voice but not a singing one; so, I don't know how to sing, but I do it loudly anyway, so to speak. There was the other option as well, supposedly art; I could find a couple like myself, easy, party like crazy, these are the notes, you can arrange them yourselves, for you are intellectuals and elitists; but I risked starving to death, so I went to uncle Bursuc and he made someone out of me as well.

Bogdan Sebastian Burjan
Dressed to the nines, he stopped at the entrance. He was gazing into space and his shoulders were slumped. Something was weighing him down. Still, all the decorations from his chest were shinning. A table for two, please. Do you have company? No. I'm alone. In front of the stage, please. Drink? Double. Dry. With ice. Anything else? Another one, the same. Maybe the music is too loud. Bring another one, please. Does the light bother you? Better bring the whole bottle. Or an unopened one, actually. He left the ashtray full, all his decorations on the table and his last hundred dollars as tip. Saigon, April 1975.

(Translated by Ioana Bobeanu / 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.