She would smile every time she would comb her thinning hair. A look, exhausted by memories, would respond from the mirror. She could feel her locks in the wind on the cruise ship of her first love. She smiles. Her eyes close once more. Her husband's fingers through her hair on that
five-star night when he asked her to be his wife for the rest of their lives. Which life? What followed were two marriages brimming with memories and a few remarkable affairs hidden under mirrored ceilings. The mirror smiles back. She ties her hair and lies back in bed. Time to take her medicine.
(Translated by Carla Bețianu / 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 May 2022, the group has 8,350 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. 
