With the Sack

Daniela G. Pătrașcu
Having grown tired after the sound beating he had given me that Thursday evening, he couldn't go to work on Friday morning, only I did. He called to let his boss know, saying he would catch up on Saturday instead. So on Saturday I waited for him to leave for work and woke the children up. I quickly threw our clothes in 4 sacks and the children's notebooks and textbooks in 4 schoolbags. I put a schoolbag on each of them, handed the boys one sack each and took the other two remaining ones myself. The girl was only 6 years old, she had seen everything, but didn't understand where we were going. To live, I told her.

Ionuț Morariu
At the morgue, the only things they could find on him were a mirror and a photo in which one could hardly distinguish a woman's face. The exorcist on duty, who had been quickly called to cast away the bad spirits hiding inside the bodies of the nameless ones, toiled all night long. In vain. The harm had been done, the portal opened. From the deceased man's sack of memories, the worst nightmares began to materialize. Then, people's fear engendered monsters. Only when the author of the treaty on the corporeality of ghosts arrived in town did the epidemic end.

Sonia Ungureanu
For a while, Tănțău's Lisandra had been carrying on her back a half-full burlap sack, tied with a piece of wire. Where ye goin'? To 'ave a look at th' cornfield there and throw this dead hen into the ditch, for there's no one to do it now, Lisandra would answer pointing at the sack. And then she would sigh and cross herself. Now, now, at least he won't beat you any more, the other women would comfort her. 'Twas a good thing he left, if only he'd never come back. Thus, Lisandra scattered bits of Tănțău's body, bone by bone, around the village. It was just when the chief constable shouted her name at the gate that she kicked the stool away.


(Translated by Mara Scoroșanu / 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 February 2025, the group has 13,650 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.