He had met her at the height of her creative skills and thought she was his muse. He had displayed her on his computer screen and told all his teasing colleagues that it was due to her, to her ideas that he got his promotion. When his muse disappeared, he got really depressed - he wouldn't even go out for a cup of coffee, he just kept working as if for a tight deadline. He was the last to leave but when a group of colleagues spotted him in the subway station they started to giggle. He slipped through the group and started running on the platform, his eyes fixed on the blinding light drawing near.
(Translated by Elena Florea / 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. 
