I take small sips, so that the red wine of Val de Loire's aroma lasts longer, it washes my tongue, unsweetened, it sticks to the palate. I stick my nose inside the glass as well, in order to feel, to not forget the summer fragrance, to hear my breath more and him less. I look at his blurred image through the glass. How he frets, he's always walking and waving around when he's trying to explain something to me. I can hear that it's too much and too hard and he doesn't care anymore and what's with all that noise in the children's room. "It's our life, so," I say, listening to the echo of my own voice inside the goblet.
(Translated by Ioana Stan / 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 February 2021, the group has 4.300 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. 
