She still wears sandals in her feet, but her shoulders are covered by a warm sweater. She walks so fast that she can barely breath. She feels like somebody's following her and she keeps looking back. Nobody's there. Suddenly she stops in front of a building with
mirror-windows. She doesn't recognize herself for a second. But the gray hairs at the top of her head give her away. Then she laughs. She realizes she has been on a hurry for nothing. The summer has gone by, but time still follows her closely. She looks at herself one more time and leaves. Slowly.
(Translated by Diana-Maria Croitoru / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 September 2021, the group has 7.150 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. 
