I Lost Your Address

Titela Durnea
I know you told me to wait for you. I had no more patience left; you know me. I said that I will come back fast and to avoid any mistakes, I scratched the address on my skin with the yellow marker you used to draw me the sunflower bouquet (the first one from you). Then, the lovely dog from the corner of the road licked me with such gratitude that I gave him the piece of pretzel. It's still here with me. In the darkness. I want to cry. But I don't. It has been my decision not to wait for you. You know what, love? I think I am not coming back.

Arthur Ianoși
I will never forget the moment when my parents lost the house. I don't blame them, I'd rather blame myself. I could have robbed a bank, I could have robbed the postman, but with a wooden gun, when you are five you can't do much. You can just cling desperately on the doorframe, screaming that you don't want to leave. The nightmares stopped when I met Diana, in the fourth grade. She invited me to her birthday. She wrote the address in a folded note. I got home, I opened it. I started to cry. Of course I didn't go.

Ana Maria Dobre-Nir
When they found her there, in the woods, under the leaves, Ion run to her parents. He knocked from door to door because he got very confused. When finally he met nea Ilie, he hugged him and started to cry. Great misfortune, godfather, great misfortune. They found the girl and it's not good. Ilie looked at him and froze. Many things went through his head, he remembered when Maria disappeared, when she was born, when she got her first fever, when she first fell in love. He wanted to die in that second, to be taken by God.

(Translated by Maria Cătălina Moisescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 March 2024, the group has 12,800 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.