I turned off the lamp over her childish hug with a book. I closed the door. I wrapped his crumpled back while sleeping and I wanted to pull the scarf under his nose, but he clung to it, stubbornly. I closed the door. I clung to his sleepy arm, swaying in the heat of his pulse, the twitching of his fingers, the deepening in his dream. I closed my eyes. I opened my eyes. I counted sheep, clouds, shadows, gray leaves, heartbeats. I waited for the last moment of abandonment in the night, without having solved any of the world's problems.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Ilie / 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. 
