Every time I climbed those damned stairs, it felt like I had too many hands, too many legs. I stumbled, the blurs of alcohol pushed me, and I managed to get on all fours upstairs, in the room she had used when she was alive. I would open the door with a prolonged squealing and thought to myself that one day I would put some oil on that hinge. And there she was dancing like a puff of smoke, and jiggling, and making me dizzy just when I saw the look of her, I will throw away all your clothes, I yelled at her, I hate you. I will wipe the dust off this djembe drum and I will forget you. The atom that fell off her shivering tambourine air tickled me and then I would collapse like a leaf.
(Translated by Mălina Ioana Butaru / 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 2022, the group has 7.830 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 Ficțiuni Reale. 
