He phoned to tell me he wanted to see us. He had taken on his actor voice. The one he used when he thought he was tricking me by playing himself. We sat down at the table, with a pair of ice cubes between us. He looked into my eyes and started to pour out everything he had lost: time, patience, interest. Anyone who would have heard him, would have known what was really the truth. Poor him had not lost anything. They were all best sealed in his heart. But in that Thursday I finally accepted that I never had the key.
(Translated by Zahra Kazemi / 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. 
