Priority

Sonia Ungureanu
The smell of fried fish lingered in her nostrils, and, on her skirt, a few oil stains crowded together, which she had sprinkled with salt - her grandma used to do that. She had no idea if it actually worked, but it had become a reflex. She had parked at an awkward angle in front of the school, and all the other drivers made their discontent known with long, blaring honks. Blondie! one of them yelled, and Cornelia flipped him off. When her hand returned to the steering wheel, her eyes lingered on the faded, chipped nail polish. The kids weren't coming out. She turned the key and drove straight to the gelato shop. Orange and basil, please.

Julia Sandu
The engine trembled beneath me like the breath of a drunk man. A red light - I grip the wheel tightly, knuckles white. The speed limit is 40, I'm at 90. I hit another yellow light, straight through it, like through shattered glass on the pavement. The road blurred, the signs in the rearview mirror ghostlike. The red lights flickered. The next sign was different - no U-turns allowed. That's when I realized: I had made every wrong turn in life. And now I see him, standing there, waiting. The only thing that makes sense. I didn't hit the brakes.

Ligia Dumitrescu
You reach the intersection, looking around frantically for road signs. From the right, a never-ending line of needs surges forward. You give them the right of way - just like you learned in driving school. You don't really understand how they all ended up weighing you down, but you carry the burden of those needs without protest. That's what the manual says - how to navigate life's roads. You glance in the rearview mirror, press the accelerator, and move forward. Sometimes, you find yourself on priority roads. And yet, you still feel the urge to yield. The power of habit.


(Translated by Andreea-Nicoleta Ban / 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.