A Photograph Forgotten in the Back of a Drawer

Oana Jindiceanu
These must be letters. Grandma told me that people used to communicate by letters back in her days. It took a few days, maybe even more for the handwritten letters to reach the consignee. The phone was already invented, but it had a wire not everyone had one. This is grandma, but I don't know who the man next to her is. There's something written on the back. I can't read the handwriting. Let me scan it. He's grandma's favourite actor, they took this photo after a show. It has a date too. Mom, what exactly is an actor?

Ioana Epure
Today is D day. That's how I named the day in which granny comes to my place with her bag full of magic. She's the only one who knows how to make all the nightmares disappear, how to pull my clouds over so that I can see the sun or the moon whenever I please, and how to walk my dog without losing it. I walk inside the house, she looks away, she's nervous. Something's wrong, granny, did anything happen to you? Grandson, I found a photo of a skeleton under the plummy dumplings recipe. Granny, I'm messy, but that is a not a photo, it's a MRI of my spine.

Aurelian Țolescu
I've been crying my eyes out after calling him on his birthday. Friend and mentor for a lifetime. I realized I was never to hear his funny voice ever again. I got home and looked for a photo of us. We were young back then. This very day I have seen his beautiful photo again, his witty smile on in front of the coffin that automatically went down towards the installations after the technical and religious formalities. The noise of the flames shocked me and looking at his photo, knowing his spirit, I realized he'd be nothing but an angel. 28.08.2023. Radu.

(Translated by Cristina-Andreea Dobre / 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 October 2023, the group has 11,950 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.