there was an instant tasting like a flash of lightning, when you knew you were alone, maybe it was at5 o'clock in the morning, on the beach, when she was wandering off and the waves were biting into one of the imaginary lines of the horizon, maybe it was when you hit the brakes while you were going 180 km/h and the fear blossomed in your chest like an airbag, but it was also the sudden moment when you felt that no, you couldn't have been alone, maybe it was at that moment when, watching the sunrise, you embraced each other naked, for the first time, like a pair of twins in the world's belly, and the old man revealed his cards, when it comes to time, that's the bet you're taking, it's all or nothing.
(Translated by Cristina-Bianca Ion / 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 December 2021, the group has 7.750 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. 
