I've known you by heart for a long time. We decided to see each other the night when you were going through rain and I was humming to you Naima on the phone. I knew the saleswomen from the market near you, the lady you were buying cheese from, the man you bought that diluted plum brandy, the lady who'd clean your house. You put me on the phone with all of them to say hello and tell them how I was doing. I was so scared to see you, I was already thinking that I was trapped. And I was right. I loved you the moment I got off the train.
(Translated by Paula-Silvia Codescu / 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. 
