Ilie is fond of digits and stars. He doesn't leave the house until he studied the position of stars depending on the area in which they move that particular day, until he deducted the distance it has to travel from the width of its aura. Before he met Maia, he asked for all her data and coordinates, in order to decide if it was worth meeting. She doesn't know the time of her birth, but she made one up, and pretended to also be 10 years younger. The perfect match. Her name is not even Maia. That is what he had been calling her for years.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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 July 2021, the group has 6.800 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. 
