A Photograph Forgotten in the Back of a Drawer

Iulia Biro
Old belongings. Dust. He's been selecting and throwing away stuff from the house that was once his mother's. On the bottom shelf of the bookcase he finds a bag that has almost entirely slipped where the plywood is detached. There's a sheet of paper and a greeting card in the bag. On the card, "Dad loves you", the date and a bunch of angry red doodles. On the paper sheet, in red, "I hate you, drunken son of a bitch, you're not my dad anymore". Involuntarily, the entire scene starts rolling inside her mind. It was his 10^th anniversary and that man pushed both his and his mother's head into the cake.

Nelida Holban
People used to call me a little daredevil. I had been snooping through the drawers and ran into a photo of a man. It was somehow faded so I refreshed it a little. If you've never tasted chemical pencil and glue from a pink waxed lidded box with a scoop, you don't know what taste is. Grandmom caught me red-handed. She looked at the coloured photo, but she didn't scold me. The only thing she said was: some pay with their lives and others with their souls. Later I found out it was a picture of my grandad, who had been shot by a drunken Russian in front of the gate belonging to the woman they used to share.

Lucian Domșa
Vasile Manciu showed Manole the landholder a necklace he had found at the bottom of a chest of drawers before the mansion being set on fire. After he opened the lid, he saw a round photo of a beautiful woman holding a baby to her chest. It looks as if it were Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, he whispered while crossing himself. Who were his parents? the landholder grinned. That's our boyar when he was a baby boy and that woman's his mom. God will punish us for the arson, sighed Manciu. Manole shook his hand in disgust. The boyar burned alive together with his wife and all.

(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.