Don't get in the elevator, it's broken. They said they were coming to fix it. For three days, my neighbor Iftimi had been the stairwell's guard. He was smiling warmly, sitting on a fishing chair with his thick socks, his head covered by a knitted hat. The old man and the elevator wouldd always present themselves. And what about the sea, I jokingly asked him? You know that I was a sailor. My dear Doina has been waiting for me for thirty years and she complains that she is cold without me, even on summer days. Now she is gone and loneliness is too turbulent. We will also talk tomorrow.
(Translated by Delia-Maria Cocoș / 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. 
