We bumped into each other in the carpet department. I don't recall which one of us was the clumsier. The thing is, we arrived face to face. We apologized to each other. In the speakers, a voice announced the closing. Eight more minutes. Without a word, we started kissing behind a hanging rug.
We were stuck in the department store until morning, lying on a tasseled Persian. We made love and talked about ourselves.
It's been 20 years since. In the living room we've got the carpet that hid our idyll that day.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Ilie / 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. 
