Last night I dreamt of the beach house again. In the living room, the box with the bow sits unopened. I walk past it and out onto the terrace. In my nostrils, the smell of salt and seaweed. On the horizon, clouds piled up like before the rain. I walk towards the cliffs and watch the waves breaking in the sea. A cold gust of wind lays my shawl across my shoulders. It smells of you and something heavy, metallic. And then, I know. I run home, it's already night, the box is open, and out of it, the lighthouse shines bright. It's you at the window. You, before you throw yourself out.
(Translated by Carla-Marina Ștefănescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 March 2022, the group has 8,050 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. 
