Juliet woke up flabbergasted in manele music. It smelled like
century-old dust, rottenness and monastic books. She blinked to seal the light inside her eyes, quickly, to catch her disorderly scattered stream of thoughts. She was alive, oh, sweet victory, she arranged her corset and shook the leaves off her long hair. Da Porta had sent an epistle, promising he would wake up one day later, but father Luigi got the
concentrate-formula wrong and the
almost-eternity came in a small brown bottle that still had a smell of bitter almonds and basil on the edges of its lips. Oh, Romeo.
(Translated by Alexandra Lica / 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 June 2021, the group has 6.650 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. 
