Another Man's Grave

Alina Pădurariu
He called me on the 24^th of December. Shall I answer? Who hires a private detective on Christmas Eve? The woman was hysterical, babbling on and on about her lover who was also her best friend's friend. I explained her that I don't get involved into such twisted situations. She said it wasn't twisted at all. She only wanted to prove that her husband, who was also the friend of her best friend's friend, was gay. So, she and her husband had the same lover. She suddenly stopped as she spoke from the lover's bedroom. Her husband just opened the door.

Cristina Daniela Dumitru-Pascal
He had been a nerd. He had become a bookworm. He hadn't really had anything to do with women. When he met her and they went out to have dinner, he realized he wanted her. No strings. He had to prove her he was a man she could rely on. He paid a friend to accost her in the restaurant while he was in the restroom and he came back to defend her. With words, not with slaps 'cause it would've cost him more. Back in the room, he was speechless. The man was on the ground with the woman on top of him. He was begging for mercy. Of course, he didn't have the courage either to refuse her when she asked him to marry her.

Elena Fermuș
Deva was always playing alone. All neighbours' children rejected her because she wasn't like them. She was born with cleft palate. With wolf's mouth, as they call it. When it rained, she'd at home and colour the clouds pink. When the sun came out again, she'd go out in the yard to the sandpile. With a little shovel and star and moon shapes. Sometimes she'd build a big castle, in which she was the fairy that made the world a better place. Other times, she'd make several little graves and bury all the evil influences which came from outside. And she'd plant flowers on them.

(Translated by Irina Vild / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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.