I was looking through the 25-year old wedding photos. At first, I smiled with nostalgia, then I saw him. A young handsome man appeared in every photo of us, in the weirdest positions, looking over the bride's shoulder, sitting on a chair next to the group, passing by with a bag in his hand, leaning against a wall. I didn't remember him and my friends couldn't tell me who he was either. I didn't remember seeing him in our wedding pictures before. After a while I found out who he was. He had been his first lover. He had died before we met.
(Translated by Ioana Busuioc / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan / Edited 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 February 2023, the group has 10,500 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. 
