I'm a Cabbage

Monica Bologa
The man with brown eyes puts me on the table and starts to unwrap me, leaf by leaf. He fills me in with minced meat, he rolls me, he wraps me delicately with his big hands like shovels. He shapes me in his palms, he squeezes me between his fingers and then he puts me on a bed covered with the clothes thrown off me. He heats me well. Hot and willing to be completely devoured, I end up in his plate. He opens me with lust, he gobbles the meat and then he throws me in the trash. You eat the stuffed cabbage rolls with cabbage too, you moron.

Camil Popescu
I was secretly in love and silent like a fish. It was impossible for me to ask her to be my girlfriend, a saying they used back then. I used to hear, admiringly, about some guy, the way he asked some girl in the neighbourhood, but to me that seemed too ordinary. I used to go round her street with my bicycle and sometimes I could see her in her front yard. When she was coming to the gate, my heart was sending waves of heat inside my body, and if someone had joined the pimples on my face, as one would join the dots with a pencil in children's books, in order to discover the picture, they would have discovered a cabbage.

Florentina Enache
Since the changing of the time, I sleep less and I have strange dreams. In one of these, I was at the countryside at my grandparents' house, alone in the yard. A green Mini stopped in front of the yard and Brad and Keanu came out. You know them. And they come inside my yard and we start talking; I was so dizzy, I can't even remember what they said, in what language we spoke, or anything like that. And there comes Jet Li, carrying a sack full of cabbage on his back. He chattered about something, but I could not understand a word. I am too tired, isn't it? Girl, take a vacation and pull yourself together. You are stressed about the pickles; it will not pass until you prepare them.

(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.