She feels the crumpled bedsheet under her left thigh and she tries to fix it in order to fall back asleep. Some shy rays of sunshine are already sneaking past the thick folds of the curtain and it is only then that she realizes that she hasn't heard the phone alarm. She extends her arm to grab it off the nightstand and she enters a state of panic: the phone is dead. She was so happy they met last night that she forgot to charge it. She jumps out of bed and shakes Remus, who is sleeping like a baby. If only she could remember the time her husband's train arrives.
(Translated by Claudia Cioplea / 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. 
