They waited until they could the elevator door closing, opened the closet door and felt around for the box. They opened it with the same emotion you'd feel when holding your baby for the first time in the maternity and caressed them with longing before putting them on. They admired their strained ankles, choked by the heel straps, with silent pleasure. They were Aphrodite, consumed by the flames of a thousand Prometheuses. Or maybe a Cleopatra, commanding over roman armies. When the elevator door could be heard again, as soon as his wife appeared, the shoes were back in the closet.
(Translated by Ruxandra Ioana Vasile / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 May 2021, the group has 6.400 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, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
