The Headless Horseman

Iulia Biro
From city to city, from woman to woman, life had been a relentless chase for pleasure. He had filled every moment as much as he could, enough not to remain still, enough not to question. When the pandemic came, it felt like being caught in the fog in the middle of an unlit intersection, at night. He wasn't sure where he should go, nor could he stay. Locked in the hastily rented room in the nameless city, where he had planned to stay only for the sake of a woman, he would have cut off his head just to escape the thoughts that had caught up with him.

Nicolae Popescu
Mărgelatu[1] and Buză[2] enter a tavern. Almost immediately, they are thrown out the window. Shards, cuts, dust on the street. The two get up and jump onto horses that appear as if on command. A band of mercenar soldiers chases after them. A pursuit, gunshots, some die, but not Mărgelatu and Buză, or the film would end. Only one rider is still on their tail. They run out of bullets and stop at the command. They stand with their hands hanging in the air. The chief soldier Velisar, is there, from the tavern tax office. Hey, when are you going to pay for those drinks on the tab?
Ana Maria Dobre-Nir
On the imagined fields, a white horse galloped, stepping on flowers that crumbled into a suffocating dust. In the saddle, a lost knight, with empty eyes, wore a head made of purple smoke. Suddenly, the horse stopped abruptly, digging into the ground. From the cracks, a golden vine shot up, coiling around his legs, trying to pull him down into the depths. The knight laughed and stretched out his hand towards the vine, murmuring strange words, like the prayer of a syphilitic, convinced that there, at the bottom, lay the gate to heaven. Those who followed him, hypnotized, leapt into the abyss.

(Translated by Miruna Baicu / 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.