He fell in love for the first time in seventh grade. In order to gain courage to ask her out to the coffee shop, he practiced in front of the mirror. He was about to declare his burning love for her, how he longed for her and dreamed of holding her hand. He could not hope to have a moustache as wiry as his father's. His moustache was soft and sticking a false moustache on would be ridiculous. However, he inherited true manliness from home. One day he gathered all of the courage he built from the mirror, shaved himself a
dad-like bald cut and with heavy steps, left to meet her.
(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. 
