I'm fine here. It's true, I smell like coffee with milk and next to me is a rotten slice of watermelon. And I'm bothered by the tin packaging that has landed right on my head. It's also a bit dark. But if I think about it, none of these really matter. The lips that touched me earlier, those lips that sipped coffee from me - were so pleasant and soft. And the hand that crushed my cardboard body was so delicate. It doesn't even matter who I share the house with now. I close my eyes and I dream of being recycled.
(Translated by Ecaterina Buşe / 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 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 Ficţiuni Reale. 
