04.07.2025

Vlad Mușat
The green soldier-boy must escape from the closet again, the everyday battlefield. He is alone against all the other soldier-boys. He comes to the front line, then he makes a shield from the body of a dead enemy and manages to defeat a whole army. In the end, he has to fight the strongest enemy, a general who looks exactly like him, but with a missing arm. I come out of the closet and I place my hero next to the picture with the man in a uniform. It would have been better if my dad were a security guard, like Petruț's father.

 Ana-Maria Butuza
That room has always been locked. She never knew what was in there, only what she could see through the keyhole. One day, she found the door wide open. It was empty. Everything was gone. Ana went in, locked the door and laid on the floor staring at the celling: my own room, said she to herself and repeated it in her mind many times. The following day, she brought a limp table, a wooden chest, a blanket, a few books and her secret diary. They couldn't see her anymore in the afternoons, then they couldn't see her for days, forgetting she even existed. When they remembered about her, the girl had become transparent.

Adriana Patroi Miu
The wind brought warm air from the forest and it smelled like fog. At the beginning, the children didn't give it much importance; in August everything seems hotter. They didn't pay attention to the scream of the birds either, they were more preoccupied about catching the stag beetle convoy. They had come from nowhere and they were falling numb in the dust. The sound of a tree falling to the ground woke them up. It had lost the battle with the fire and was now writhing in the embers. They broke into a run towards the river, where the dragon had no power anymore. We are born 80% water. We are.

(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.

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