We would go to IKEA on every Thursday. 9 A.M. Not a single soul. Cold shelves and pillows that were not yet flattened by the weight of desire. We would jump on every bed. Carefully, so that we wouldn't cut it neither with our ribs nor with the glass from our feet. Then we would drink out coffee at the table towards the bathroom. An expensive set, especially because we didn't have neither money, nor a kitchen to put it in. The employees would tolerate us, only because after meals, we would diligently clean the bathroom. We would even empty the vacuum after that. We would leave at night, thinking how good it is we don't have a house. It's so hard doing all the housework.
(Translated by Ema-Teodora Rădulescu / 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 August 2022, the group has 9,000 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, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
