This ladder made of fir I climbed as a child to bring my father back home. I missed him so much and mother said that he went to the heavens. Next to the one made of cherry wood I cried as a girl the whole night long, longing for the blue eyes that left to bring me the moon in the sky and gone they were. Do you see the one with broken steps? I used it to whitewash the cottage and clean the drainage tile, I was the man when needed and I don't regret a thing, except that the time gnawed at these ladders like a damn woodworm. I'll take them to the man that repairs ladders, sweetie, to get them fixed.
(Translated by Dragoş Frangulea / 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 June 2021, the group has 6.650 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
