I make portraits of my girlfriend everyday. In Place du Tertre, I tell dozens of painters clearly what I want, and they color it. For a year, me, her, and the same painters. They run away from me, because I don't see their efforts. It's just that they don't know my girlfriend the same way I do. A trembling lip, a drooping earring, a worried forehead, a rather innocent smile, a shadow in the iris. And then another portrait. I sold everything for the painters. But I finally have her perfect portrait. Tomorrow I'm looking for her in the world. I hope she'll like the man with just a drawing in his pocket.
(Translated by Oana Georgiana Minea / 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 August 2021, the group has 7.000 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 Ficțiuni Reale. 
