I'm in the driver's seat of the time machine. The image becomes sharper as I fine-tune some last minute settings. Ah, here we are at 16 - Andrei and I and the two girls, the blonde and brunette. We'd run away from home and off to the seaside. All of us underage. Them - supple, us - scrawny. Them - beautiful, us - brimming with hormones. There's the Obelix, the ice-cream, dancing on the beach, light touches, make-up free smiles and kisses without glossy lipsticks. I press the
Reset button firmly and then
Restart. I'll give the brunette a go this time around - the blonde sucked the life out of me for twenty-five years.
(temă în parteneriat cu
Ideo Ideis, 2022)
(Translated by Carla Bețianu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 August 2022, the group has 9,000 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. 
