I saw him in the subway. His clothes looked messy and his eyes were red. I dove my hands deep into the pockets of my raincoat. I think I used to wear it back then as well. When we first met, he was studying theatre, second year and I was working at the nearby pub. We had been actors in the same play for two years. He suddenly wrote me he needs to step down, because I am the one who's holding him in place. Until the end of my
twelve-hour shift, he was gone for good. Next station is Piata Romana. This is my stop. I wonder if the rest are travelling just like that. Without any of them imagining other lives? I don't think so, that would be really boring.
(Translated by Carol Popa Zafiriadi / 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 October 2021, the group has 7.275 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. 
