You wanted to show me the new red shoes. We met at the edge of the Earth, where the sand melts into the sea. You walked in barefoot, holding the shoes in your hand. You laid on the sand besides me, took my hand and we stood there in silence for a long time, until stars filled the sky. Many palms were sprouting from the sands, like huge butterflies, settling on our hips, chests, arms, cheeks and hair. They raised us into air and we began floating towards the light like two Zeppelins. The shoes remained on the sand.
(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.
