She's 18, he's 20. A baby? What are we going to do with her? We'll raise her, it won't be hard, you'll see. She's 25, he's 27, the child's 7. He leaves. They stay. She's 30, he's 34. A baby? I can't believe this. A family. And planning. And painted walls. Happiness. She's 34, he's 38, the child's 4. He walks away from them, she walks away from the walls. When I met her in Paris one morning, she was drinking brandy out of a coffee cup, smoking, singing flatly and freely, mocking the music in her headphones. She was 80. Cut. We're doing the Paris scene again. She was sitting at a table.
(Translated by Carla Beţianu / 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. 
