Photocopier

I have brought you mine these days, I need some copies, please.
This is the day I was born, one copy should do, I haven't been told so much about it. On the second sheet is the day I bruised my left knee and my grandmother lifted me with only one hand. On the third one is all of my teens, and the related crushes. On the fourth one is my mother. On the fifth one, the rest of the world. If you run out of paper, you may give the sixth paper back to me. It's not complete, anyway, I've yet to put the rest of my life there.

(Translated by Andra Daiana Păuna / 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 January 2021, the group has 3.000 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

*Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.