I stayed with her for nine months. Well, in a way, in her as well. I thought we'd be together forever, and that the dreams she spoke of were about me. That I was only hers, just as she was only mine, even if she did not want me. Even if I hadn't been the one to choose her. I wiped her blood from my mouth and I embraced the fact that she chose to give up on everything we could have been. I could have become whatever she had dreamt about becoming, but couldn't. I would have made her happy. But I didn't choose her. If I were the one choosing, I would have chosen a mom that stayed.
(Translated by Ruxandra Ioana Vasile / 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 Ficţiuni Reale. 
