I was born too early or too late. Years of pointless therapy, I might say. Try the super remote control. It works wonders, he says. Later on I dial the year, day and hour of the date, while shivering with emotion. She's arrived. She has an amandine in front of her, and he will enter the room in 45 seconds. I come closer and I say, like a thought. Don't eat that cake. You are going to get pregnant, and the boy will try to commit suicide all his life. She flinches, she gets up, and she leaves. She bumps into a man at the door, she apologizes, and she moves on. I drift away into a void of nothingness.
(Translated by Ioana Oacheşu / 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. 
