I was waiting for her, my girlfriend. I was deeply in love. Sadly, she had one flaw that kind of annoyed me: she was tardy. At just about every date. See? She is already fifteen minutes late. It was cold outside and I was chilled to the bone. I will wait just eight more minutes and then I'm leaving. I'm going to break up with her. I kept checking the time, minutes were passing without so much of a peep from her. Just as I was about to leave, she appeared. My goodness she was so beautiful. I forgot on the spot that she was late. We stuck together ever since. She was no longer tardy.
(Translated by Jin Cristian Yang / 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. 
