With the Sack

Gabriela Marinescu
In the lowland village, the lanes were wider than the main road. In the morning, the combines would enter the fields, trailers in tow, and leave in the evening when the cows returned from grazing. Polina returned home at the same time as the last trailer. She walked softly through the big gate. She went straight to the hayloft and took off her two black aprons. With both hands she caressed the large corn cobs carefully shoved into the many pockets sewn into her pleated skirt. You keep stealing sackfuls, I'll steal pocketfuls too. It's my inheritance, not the farmer's co-op's land.

Cristina Daniela Dumitru-Pascal
I don't like sacks. To me a sack is a black bag filled with a dead body and plenty of sadness. I was a little girl when my friend got shoved into one. I cried. The doctor came to issue the death certificate, and the police came to make sure it wasn't a suspicious death. They couldn't figure it out and said an autopsy was needed. I cried. I could only watch as they dragged him away, because my friend was a little fat. Droplets of blood soaked the ground. I cried. His name was Ham. He was my pig. And the bacon was delicious. I cried as I ate.

Iulia Stavre
Mom dresses her in white, curls her hair and places a tiara on her head. Dad tells her she's the Snowflake Princess. Her first Christmas performance. On stage, alone, without them. She can no longer see them in the audience. A hollow feeling settles in her stomach, her lips are dry. The words of the poem she memorized swirl together in her head. The teacher encourages her with a look. As she recites the poem to Santa, she rubs her little hands and gazes down at the sack full of gifts. On the way home, as she's walking happily between her parents, she says: You know, dad, Santa had shoes just like yours.


(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.