Manhattan, 2073. December blaze

You promised me you\'d take me to see the Statue of Liberty, if I lived to be a hundred. A good reason to fight death. 2073 caught me toothless, hunched, but alive. A journey, a dream has kept me alive for a century. On the plane, above the clouds, I fell asleep leaning on your shoulder. When we got off on American land, we were struck by a terrible heat. Old lady, we\'re going to boil to death, you said to me. I survived a war, a freezing marriage; we\'ll get through this December blaze, too. Just hold my hand.

(Translated by Eleonora Manea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Professor Nadina Vişan)


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 January 2021, the group has 3.000 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

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