It happened right at the turn of the year, in my friend's living room. He was among the guests too; a man I saw for the first time. At midnight, we wished each other Happy New Year with glasses full of champagne. The stranger got closer and kissed me. Flowers began to grow from the piano, swarms of butterflies came off the walls, avalanches of confetti erupted from the light bulbs. It was me, but it wasn't like I was, and yet I was where I had never been.
(Translated by Ana Spînu / 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. 
