The first time she touched me, her hand was super greasy, but I didn\'t care. She had big hands, gnarled fingers, and her fingernails cut short. I liked how gently she touched me, a bit bashful, as if she didn\'t know what she was doing. Everything ended up being perfunctory with my ex, it drove me crazy how recklessly she used me, and that\'s why sometimes I gave her colorless pages.
The second time, she made smudges of cheese puffs on me, and then of chocolate. One day she left some garlic sauce on me. It made no difference. I was in love.
(Translated by Andra Daiana Păuna / 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 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.
