We had been chatting online for weeks. I pretended to be Ioana, a
19-year-old student whereas he was Bobby, a young writer. So we decided on a first date. At the theatre. He had got tickets so, on a Thursday evening, at 7 p.m., he was waiting for me outside the National Theatre in Bucharest. The more we got closer, the more he looked like him. Can't be, I said to myself. Then I went as white as a sheet and asked him: Are you going to take me to this obsolete play once more? In 15 years of marriage, he hadn't changed a bit.
(Translated by Elena Florea / 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 March 2021, the group has 4.500 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. 
