Priority

Gheorghiță Mircea
He was going back home. He had always been having other priorities, for years and years, anything other than seeing her. He had been gone from the village lost on fruitless hills, the brilliant student, the successful attorney, the politician experienced in making and breaking alliances, the father of organic laws of the functioning of the state, the decorated knight, the familist role model, he felt tired after the electoral failure. He found his parent's home unchanged. He smiled. Come on in, the old woman said. There is one priority I have now, and that is to go to the restroom. In the back yard, my dear, it's still there.

Florentina Enache
She was sitting on the sofa reading, when a rat with a blue cape went from the balcony towards the kitchen. She blinked shortly, just enough to make the vision pass and she turned the page. She recorded then a detachment of hamsters with green hats, followed by woodchucks with mirror glasses and by a division of purple kittens. What are you doing here? We're marching, mam'; we're going to the parade and our GPS got us on this unmarked route. We'll be done soon; after the camels and the gorillas, the elephants will come and that's it, you'll get rid of us. There was a smell of wild mushrooms in the air.

Monica Aldea
Christmas Eve got the young Marten a little down. If he gets a wool blanket from mom and a hatchet from Manole again, it means Santa doesn't understand and that's it. He took the Christmas tree down, and head for home. Lady Nasta came quickly on her horse. Your longing for me has driven you so quickly towards me, my lady, did you come because you missed me, or did you bring some poale în brâu^[1] and they got cold on the way? The Turks started a fire at the border, quickly go to the army. Now, please forgive me, said the lad, putting the fir tree on his back. There's no need to hurry. The Moldavians can live without Turks but not without a Christmas tree.


(Translated by Diana Sitaru / 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.