Shadows and Lights

Iulia Biro
He's been listening to music, looking out the window since he sat down. How old could he be, thirty, thirty-five? The train's crossing a plain and you can see the shadows of the trees and pillars left behind, running across the man's face. Shadow, light, shadow, a grimace when the light's too strong. His blue eyes vanish under his eyelids with fair eyelashes. His beard, which is currently growing, fair too, his lips are young and pulpy. She's fantasizing about being next to him in bed in the morning, and she'd be at least twenty years younger, and sighs. She takes her book and runs away.

Sara Ungureanu
First, she heard his boots coming towards the room, then the door squeaking. When she had the guts to look in his direction, she could only see his shadow, cast on the wall like a black monster. First, she tried to pretend she was sleeping, but she realized that things don't work like that. With just a small flick of the switch, the shadows flooded the room and all the lights were gone. She picked up her doll, preparing for the shame and pain that were about to keep her awake for hours. Always naked, he would get in bed and whisper that all little girls do that with their fathers.

Adriana Patroi Miu
What could be worse than the cold? She had asked herself when she had got her sentence. The beating was no longer hurting her, but the thought of lying naked on the concrete horrified her. She was wrong, it was warm in the cell, only the smell of a dead thing had managed to install in the water leaking through the bricks. It was enough not to kill her. She scratched the wall with her nails. That won't work, her cellmate told her. You can't escape. I didn't want to escape, I was looking for the light. I wanted to leave a message while my mind was still thinking straight. But the water erased every letter.

(Translated by Cristina-Andreea Dobre / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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.