The cords we were hanging around next to, beside the small table in the hall, waiting for a ring, are now a story of the past. Sometimes we got to the coupler, a technical invention, two posts on three lines instead of four. When we went outside, the only cord that kept us attached to our home was the string of keys around our neck. We would play the game, making fun of what we had started with and what our muttered whispers ended up as. Today we're no longer staying close to the phone, but the phone is close to us. No cord. And being found anywhere in this world does no longer seem as interesting as before.
(Translated by Mihaela Dumitrescu / 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. 
