Make Haste Slowly

Andra Toropoc
She took the first step and invited her young, single colleague over for dinner. She went into a frenzy, she filled the kitchen with appliances to show him that she was a good housewife. She had her hair done, waxed, so he'd be overwhelmed by her beauty. She played a CD of operas to show him she's cultured. She also kept some manele^[1] at hand, just in case. That's why she put the champagne in the bedroom, pray to God maybe it will happen. The man came in and sniffed the PVC aroma in the house. She got all excited when he leaned over and told her flat out: I'm hungry. Her face went pale, she had forgotten about food.

Adina Drag
There's an arousing thread that connects the haste to the unhaste. I pull it. It unravels in moments that change their purpose too quickly. The drops hit the flesh brutally and turn the faience into crooked faces that urge me to stay. The steam rises and curls against the mirror. My heart pounds, my body demands the rush, but my footsteps sink into calculated slowness, like the blades that choose exactly where to cut. I don't want to know what time it is, I don't want to know that time is running out of time. My hand reaches for the towel, its hand pulls me back.
 
 Vero Anttheia Teodoru
They hurried to blossom and now they lie with their branches broken under the weight of the snow. Christ is risen from the dead trampling over death by death this year too, in a few days the women will worship again, murmuring with their lips into the corner of their head scarves, supposedly praying. The flowers, however, will remain stuck forever without us knowing their taste. The order of life is long dead. The bells of the little church in the center of the village ring. In the corner of a pub, time has stopped in a half-full pint.

 
(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 May 2025, the group has 13,775 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.