The alcohol went down his throat like a hot river of sensations and memories. Five minutes before he he'd been storming into the house and throwing everything out of the pantry looking for the bottle stashed there several years ago, when he'd been forbidden to drink anymore. One hour before he'd been leaving the doctor's office and desperately running straight home, stunned by the flat diagnostic: the cancer had returned. One more time he inhaled the fumes of alcohol stuck to the roof of his mouth. He twisted the cap back on, put the bottle on the table and quietly sank down in his chair. He would fight.
(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. 
