God, look, she's here. She's wonderful, her dress fluttering, revealing her thin ankles. I could whoop, can't believe she is mine. The ring, hope I didn't forget it. Ugh, it's in the pocket, got scared in vain. Should I get on one knee? No, she doesn't like
old-fashioned romances, I'll just tell her I want to be with her for the whole of my life. I start with 'darling' and I freeze when I hear her saying sharply that she came to say goodbye, she loves another man. Will you marry me, I still get to whisper, but only the wind waving her dress can hear me.
(Translated by Ecaterina Bucovanu / 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. 
