A New Hope

Yuka Brevi
Hey, I really like how you look. If we tear your clothes here a bit more, you're ready. You go right there, in the corner, you sit down and hold this dog on your lap. It's dirty, but that's how you'll impress the people. You don't beg for anything. You just sit there and watch the people passing by. You frown, just like this, and let the corners of your mouth go down. I'll give you this pretzel, as well. Don't eat it, it's made of plastic. You just place it on the ground, next to you. Take these two bags, too and put everything you get inside them. I'll pass by once in a while and swap them. Did you understand or do you want me to repeat? I trust you. Don't you dare disappear like the others.

Laura Stanciu
It's the 23^rd of November 2024. The show is over. It was the last performance of the tour. There's only a guitar left on the stage, leaning against the artist's chair. There's also a microphone with drained batteries. Two silhouettes head backstage, passing through the dim lights of a hallway, they exit through the back door and walk away. In thousands of houses, we are all humming in our mind in the blue night a whispered song for 2000 years[1]. The music is echoing farther. How far?[2] In memoriam Marius Bațu and Gabriel Cotabiță. Alexandra Buhudini
(Translated by Adina-Lorena Dulamă / 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.