I Reincarnated as a Bird

Cristina Daniela Dumitru-Pascal
From the flight, she smelled the stench of carrion. She got closer. She plunged his beak into an eye, like into a perfectly cooked yolk. She moved on to the brain. She stopped. Her heart was racing. Her skin was prickling. She began to pluck her feathers. From her beak, a greenish saliva was flowing. Or was it blood? She tried to rise. Her claws detached on their own and fell. One by one. The pain was unbearable. She felt nauseous, and her mouth filled with something slimy. Slimy. She couldn't breathe. She dove down. She hit the ground. Did she die? It's good. She doesn't dream anymore. She's past withdrawal.

Iulia Vucmanovici
I was a miserable utensil when I landed in the pot of socialist broth, fervently praying to my winged superiors to let me join the angels. They didn't even look at such a miser. I found myself back on the ground. Eight more times. Sometimes a cuckoo clock, sometimes a whistle-bird at the fair, sometimes a turtle dove. This time, I hit the mark. They assigned me to Hollywood, to tap my beak on the window of a phone booth. That's all I heard: cut. Then, I woke up in the soup, in Buftea. Someone was taking me with a spoon to my mouth, an adjective police officer.

Caterina Tudorache
So how should I tell you? I don't exactly know what I was, but I heard flap flap. Flap flap. I thought like this, in my dream. Maybe I'm some kind of bird. A bird, me , the person who doesn't eat chicken, not even dead? You fool, a bird is also a goose or a turkey. Those aren't chickens, because they're fat. Who's fat, huh? Haven't you seen Nae's turkeys? Thin and stupid, just like him. Yeah, but turkeys are usually fat. Like Titi, the policeman. He really loves the little hens. They both laughed and clinked another round. So what was I saying? About Titi. Right. What? What what? What was I saying about Titi? Which one? The policeman. Something with flapping.

(Translated by Iulia-Mihaela Țugulea / 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 March 2025, the group has 13,700 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.