I woke up thinking that I must tell him that I care. I do not know if it was the cocoa smell that made me miss him or whether it was the book still untouched from Christmas. I called him ten times. The subscriber can not be reached. Then it hit me that he was one of the many people whose existence I was taking for granted. He was there whenever I needed him and that was what mattered. Now he was not available and that thought was scaring me. "Thank you for existing" I told him when he finally called me back. A smile much the same as a hug was what put an end to my expectation, and his as well.
(Translated by Delia-Maria Cocoș / 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. 
