I've fallen in love. You can tell me that it's not real, that it's stupid, that it's just one of nature's trick to ensure the species' survival. I know what I feel. Exactly: the birds are singing, the butterflies fly around in my stomach, I smile like an idiot. Even though I'm 70 years old, I've fallen in love. I don't have kids so I don't know what a mother's love feels like, but I do know what it feels like to love as a woman. I don't consider myself an old hag, I take care of myself pretty well. My only issue is telling him how I feel. I'll ask him out for a coffee tomorrow. He's my roommate at the asylum.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Ciucașu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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. 
