You smell the same. It's the perfume that I turn my head on the street after, and I surprise myself by recognising it when worn by strangers. The memory that I carried for so long in my breast pocket receives a forced update once you hug me, like an app on my phone connected to
wi-fi. The greying temples, the wedding band on your left finger, the fine wrinkles. You smell the same; you smile the same. I love you the same. Only now do we both know it, and this reunion has something of the daze of first dates.
(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. 
