Her pastel-like dress highlighted her shape, without being provocative. She was nervous, but the passion for what she did was greater as usual. Give me a number up to 1000, she said to the audience before her. 821, a man's voice was heard. She flinched. She had thought of the same number. At daybreak, she read in the horoscope that math would chose her predestined one. 821, please come forward. As he approached, she felt chills top to bottom, a shiver went up from her feet, to her stomach and then to her brain, where everything she had known before she forgot. What now?
(Translated by Denisa Stanciu / 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 July 2022, the group has 8,750 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. 
