I'm a Cabbage

Ana Maria Dobre-Nir
I arrived in the purgatory. It's quiet. The other mice are looking at me with curiosity, so I tell them how everything ended for me. The sour smell had lured me. I slipped into the barrel and, before I even knew, I was already in the cold, salty water. I used my paws to paddle, but it was already too late. All I could see were pieces of cabbage rolling around in a strange dance. Everybody around is speechless, they look at me gravely. An older mouse sighs. Then, he mumbles with a deep voice. Temptation doesn't miss anyone. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate[1].

Carmen-Ecaterina Ciobâcă
I wake up dizzy, I run to catch the tram, I stand on one foot on the stairs, I am late, my boss frowns at me, I sit in front of my computer, I yawn till my jaws are twitching, someone asks me something, I don't understand anything, oh, how I would sleep with my head on my desk, someone else shows me a diagram, I would eat some pie, no, the pie is sweet, something sour would be better. Pickled cucumbers, pickled tomatoes, sour water from the sauerkraut barrel or at least lemons. At 5 o'clock I'm out, I have a meeting. Brine, look for brine, I yell to my husband from the door way when I get home. And yes, it's a boy.

Aurelian Țolescu
Huge tragedy before Christmas. My mother broke her arm, my dad had been gone and didn't get to make pickled cabbage. There was the perspective of a profound crisis at the Christmas dinner, because of a lack of stuffed cabbage rolls. They didn't accept to buy pickled cabbage from the market because it wasn't good enough, because they didn't know how the peasants made it, etc. Therefore, I bought some pickled cabbage from the market without them knowing about it, from a man from Botoșani and I made stuffed cabbage rolls myself, using the recipe from the Cooking book. They spoke about those amazing stuffed cabbage rolls for ten years.
 
(Translated by Diana Sitaru / 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 January 2025, the group has 13,600 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.