Yo, man, what you have done to me. You got me used to the guitar, the mountains, the girls, the benders. You had started to behave for a while, settled down with beautiful, happy kids; we were partying greatly together. On that summer, the air was scorching like your forehead. You told me you wouldn't last through the third round of cytostatic drugs, and I laughed at you, making future plans for you. My dear and only one, you've been the one to laugh at me for the last ten years. From heaven. But forget it, because we will see each other soon enough. The children wear your smile with a shadow of longing.
(Translated by Camelia Diaconu / 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 April 2022, the group has 8,175 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. 
