A strong smell of flowers woke me up. It was so hard to open my eyes. I began to touch the things around me and I reached the flowers. Hyacinths, I love the smell of hyacinths. I still couldn't see where I was. My body was relaxed, almost numb. I touched my lips with my tongue. They weren't dry, and I wasn't thirsty. I'm going to bite my lips. Yes, it hurts. Now that I'm conscious, all that I have to do is to see where I am. You're still living the day before. You're still living the day before. I bump into these words and I go back to where I left off.
(Translated by Ioana Oacheșu / 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. 
