She left the store holding the shoe box tightly to her chest, close to her heart. She kept thinking about them and finally made a choice. Happiness had to be worn with style. It was the meeting of her life. She had finally found them. She knew they would spend their life together. The atmosphere around her turned heavy with emotion. In her rush towards the past, she was a step too late in her future. She turns at the sudden sound and is left lifeless on the pavement. The shoes walk into a pool of light.
(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. 
