Don't get drunk until I get back, she said. He smiled in resignation. He doesn't know I hid his bottle, she thought. She doesn't know that I know where she hid the brandy, he hummed with shimmering eyes on the bottle. The first glass was distressing. The second of lust. Next to his soul. Then the forgiveness of sins. When she returned, she found him like this, with his elbows on his knees, one eye asleep but the other very attentive. What did I tell you, man, when I went to church? To die. Did I tell you that, to die? To die, if I remember.
(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. 
