The woman enters the apartment, throws her wet coat on the floor, chooses a glass and pours from the smoky bottle. She sits on the armchair next to the mobile bed, mounted next to the window. I missed you. I have no wine for tomorrow. Is the mask fine? Are you comfortable? How was your day?
Across the street, from the window of the apartment on the
tenth-floor, the old man looks attentively into the distance. For 8 years, the neighbor across the street has had the same ritual: she slowly sips from her glass and carefully arranges the bedding of an empty bed.
(Translated by Claudia Alexandra Văcărescu / 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. 
