I take my place quietly in line. Calm. Optimism. Zen. It's the first copy and I don't want to wrinkle it. XEROX guarantees instantaneous bodily and emotional fidelity. Some used it as a mirror. Others for romantic relationships with themselves. However the business really took off when it came for sex. I need another self to stay at home, waiting for packages. I climb onto the rotating platform for scanning.
At the exit I'm waiting for myself smiling. Calm. Optimistic. Oh, damn. I blinked. I take my place quietly in line.
(Translated by Diana-Maria Croitoru / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Professor James Brown)
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.
