When she entered the bookstore, time stopped. It took me just three seconds to realize that she's the woman I'll get old with. I saw in her eyes how she'd give birth to our two children. I knew we'd breathe as one until death would give us a break. She bought Ernest Hemingway's
The Old Man and The Sea and Kazuo Ishiguro's
Never Let Me Go. After the doctor had given us the news, she promised me that she'll bury my ashes in the garden, under the cherry tree we'd planted together, after the bank had approved our loan.
(Translated by Oana-Roxana Dicilea / 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. 
