At first, I cried my eyes out, enough to deplete my tears and to get bored of crying while lying in bed. Then, I saw the boxes he left everywhere in house, filling every nook and cranny. I had to climb the ladder to reach those on the wardrobe, I got covered in dust and I coughed and cried again out of anger because of the boxes on the lower shelves. I threw them all out, all, all of them, there's nothing of his left here. I offered myself the space he once occupied. I never managed to fill it back again.
(Translated by Ioana Grigoruță / 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 2022, the group has 8,050 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. 
