The salty air of the sea has remained in your alveoli. Your eyes have still not adapted to the milky light that strains alongside the mountain during the already chilly mornings. Your still rusty skin tightens touched by the cold rain drops. The street is a mail box, and you are a holiday picture, strayed in one of its corners. No matter how much you want it, you understand that going back it's impossible. You straighten your back and trot, like a soldier. You arrive in the bus station just in time. The doors of the bus open, you get in and hear behind your back: You know what, mommy, today is the thirty second of August.
(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. 
