30 years since I finished high school. How quickly the years have flown. The bar was full, former classmates chatting happily, sharing life stories, interesting or otherwise. She was alone. She'd had her eyes on me all evening. I couldn't place her, although she seemed familiar. I asked among my classmates, but nobody seemed to know who she was. At one point I went out for a smoke. Do you really not recognize me? she asked. Hmm, I'm sorry, I don't. It's me, Genoiu. Mircea Genoiu. Shock.
(Translated by Cristina Fliter / 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. 
