As soon as he got to his office, he would dust off the photograph of his wife and children, then start working. Long hours spent in front of a computer. He would always stay overtime. He would eat at his desk. Long after nightfall, he would kiss the frame of the photograph and whisper, for fear of being heard, see you tomorrow. Then he would return to the house where no one was waiting for him. Where he would heat something in the microwave, then sleep without a blanket. He would wake up in the morning happily, thinking about the family that he could have had, if the world hadn't been the way it was.
(Translated by Andreea Teodorescu-Colciu / 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 2022, the group has 8,500 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. 
