I'm a Cabbage

Nicolae Popescu
It would have been better if I had come dressed as a potato, Petre thinks. His eyes dart toward Leti, the mother who came up with the idea that parents should also wear themed costumes at the Vegetable Festival. The children are singing, the parents are dancing the harvest hora, and his hot pepper costume is terribly tight. Leti spins tightly around him. Petre stares at the layers of her fitted costume, imagining tearing them off one by one. He excuses himself and heads to the bathroom. Upon returning, Ina appears: Daddy, are we going to Mommy? You're looking in vain; Mrs. Leti left with the guy dressed as a carrot.

Gheorghiță Mircea
Fane read a lot and anything he could find. Then he would come to the vacant lot and amaze us. That's what happened when he read about hypnosis. Regressive or hypnotic hypnosis, he explained, takes you back to past lives. Fane pulled out an old pocket watch with a chain, stopped in front of Gogu, the mute one, and swung it in front of his eyes. Sleep, now you are the one from the past. Gogu closed his eyes. I'm cabbage, he mumbled, then took off running, jumped over the garden fence, and squatted down among the cabbages. Years of visits to the best doctors were in vain; Gogu, now turned into Cabbage, never recovered.

Dan Banu
He came from Bangladesh but didn't really adapt to our place, even though his relatives here supported him. People made fun of him, saying his arms were as thin as toothpicks, his head as small as a thimble, and that he was wispy like a dandelion instead of being stout and strong. He wished he could look like his cousins, the white and red cabbages, or at least like his aunt, the cauliflower. They found Broccoli in a crate of vegetables behind the storage shed, trembling all over and mumbling under his breath: I'm cabbage, I'm cabbage.

(Translated by Claudia Garofina Greculeac / 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.