Romeo and Juliet sleep with the gas lamp light on, same gas lamp religiously kept since their younger days. They sleep even today holding hands. During the day he carries water from the river, she washes the laundry. He cuts the wood, she cooks the soup. He digs the furrow, she picks up the fruits. Simple life and secret living, after setting up their deaths, helped them being alive until today. He has wrinkles only around the corner of his mouth and his eyes, due to his smile. She has white long hair, falling over her shoulders, enriching her face, but sometimes, under the sun, it seems to him that she is still 15 years old.
(Translated by Raluca Simion / 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 February 2022, the group has 7,950 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. 
