With the Sack

Laura Stanciu
In the Château Frontenac hotel in Quebec, there's an exhibition of Christmas trees decorated in the most unusual ways. One with newspaper and magazine cut-outs, another with cotton candy. Two boys look at the tree decorated with chestnuts and it gets their mouths watering. Their parents take them to the Rue du Cul-de-Sac, where ripe chestnuts are sold for five dollars a cone. There are jingle bells from the shops' doors and music in the air. The children sit down in the snow and lean against a wall with a mural of a reindeer peering at them curiously.

Ana Călin
Mommy loves me but she's not all that good at showing it. Because her parents didn't show her love either, that's always her excuse. She always got me what I wanted on Christmas, but after a day of being all smiles, she starts yelling and complaining about how she does everything for me and I don't show any appreciation, how I make her upset and then ask for forgiveness. Lately, something has changed. She started studying psychology and is preparing for her first exams. This morning at breakfast she told me to bring her my cup so she can fill it with love. I came back from my room with the sack.

Magdalena Daminescu
Ever since my father ended up in prison, I became the family workhorse. Soon as the sun set, I'd hear my mother saying: Boy, take the sack, go out to the field and get some corncobs. Or: Take the sack and go to the forest to get firewood, it's our forest after all. What could I do? Good thing I had sharp eyes and never missed anything the harvesters left behind. My main concern was sneaking back home unnoticed. My route was through the gardens, and I made friends with the watchdogs, they were waiting for me. And I wasn't coming back empty-handed. They got their share of pork from the pig I was raising.


(Translated by Andrei-Bogdan Nicola / 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 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.