Picturesque

Paul Dârvariu
It was an ordinary day. The hens were clucking, the dogs were lounging, and Fănel the Crippled was wondering how to make his life more interesting. Looking at the sky, a brilliant idea struck him: to organize a neighing contest among the villagers' horses. In the end, the winner was the stallion Suru^[1], who managed to perfectly imitate the siren of an ambulance. Fănel had wished for Mirabela, his beloved mare, to win, whom he had taught to imitate the voice of Andreea Esca. Disappointed, he poured himself a shot of plum brandy and sighed: what can you do, buddy? In life, you sometimes lose.
Ana-Maria Butuza
While I was climbing, gasping like a broken engine, I was doing some self-criticism: who the hell made you come to the mountains, you who trips on asphalt? With my heart pounding and friends lost in the distance, I flopped down softly in the grass. Never mind, girl, you'll catch up with them, they won't abandon you here. Enjoy in silence: look at this forest, these flowers, this fresh air. I take a deep breath and almost faint. What the hell, do I smell like this? Maybe I'm imagining it. I catch my breath, and when I get up, I see the dung beneath me, spread out like a work of art, in the trampled grass.

Bogdan Mihai Bati
On the left, trees. On the right, a forest. Thus was the road until they reached the ridge. On the left, a chasm. On the right, a precipice. Thus was the rest of the road. From above, at the peak, they looked back. The midday sun highlighted the shed tears, the icy sweat, and the masked pains left by hordes of hikers, two by two, eager to impress each other. Here, no one came with pure thoughts, but the end justified the difficulty of the path. From here, they looked south, hoping that by evening they could look towards the nude.


(Translated by Eduard Mihai Uretu / 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.