He clung to the railing of the escalators and relived the same improbable clichés step by step: their kiss, their hurried pulse, the arching of their bodies, the triumphant scream, the clenching of their feet on the floor, my mother, what should I wear?, the coldness of an indifferent glance, dazzlingly superior, the sadness of an end in which he lived for half a lifetime as a child who had not witnessed any gesture of tenderness between them, today I leave, today I leave, today I leave and he never stays and he never leaves.
(Translated by Mara-Sabina Rolea / 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 January 2022, the group has 7.830 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. 
