Heaven's Gate

Paul Dârvariu
I've discovered the secret of immortality: put off until tomorrow what you should have done yesterday. First time was when I was three. Tetanus. I was greeted by a bearded guy. What happened to you, kid? The boo-boo on my leg. Can you count? I can count. How high? Up to 10. That's not enough. See you when you know how to count up to a billion. The second time, it was scarlet fever, I was around sixteen. You again? Have you loved women? Yes, I have. All of them? Not really, I have a few left. Go back and love them. Last night, in my sleep: did you finish all your affairs, Grigore? I did. No, you didn't. Did you make the plum brandy?

Nicolae Popescu
St. Peter scans Pricop's heart. So, forty-five percent Vera, your wife, thirty-five percent Gilda, your neighbour, and twenty percent others. Aha, there were others. Pric is sweating, St. Peter is smiling slightly: Mr. Pricop, it's all right so far, your heart beats more for your wife. You're fulfilling the conditions for acceptance into Heaven. Barely. Pric breathes a sigh of relief, and picks up his suitcase: done with the inspection, can I come in? St. Peter changes the scanner's settings: not yet, I need to check the percentages below the belt.

Monica Aldea
The house was piled high on the ground. It had locked up stories of life inside of it, it had quelled longings and frozen suffering. From the cracked walls, new moss sprouted over old memories. Codrina put down the suitcase full of labels of distant worlds. Before closing the sale, she plunged once more into the past. She saw herself on the porch, clutching her grandmother's coffee with milk skin from her hands. Keep still, child, the ground's shaken from all your running, her grandma scolded her while laughing. She pushed open the gates and stepped into childhood Heaven.


(Translated by Oana-Elena Dragnea / 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.