I can hear him breathing, sighing, laughing, keeping profusely silent and I close my eyes, pulling him even closer. I can see his tough face, furrowed in some places by the passing of the years and the sleepless nights. Then I can see how he picks up the mug and the black liquid first passes its aroma by my lips and slowly flows by his. The silence graciously spreads out its wings over our quietness, the seconds are deeply sleeping, with no time, and weave infinity bracelets for when we want to pass to the other side. To recognize each other.
(Translated by Bianca-Andreea Rîmboacă / 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 June 2022, the group has 8,500 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. 
