She was not beautiful, she was of some age, though she still had her love victims. Since she moved into her new studio flat, she found a bouquet of red roses placed on her welcome mat when she came back from work every day. This developed envy from her young, gorgeous, unlucky-in-love neighbor. Of her curiosity, she installed a video camera, as she decided to find out more about the unknown lover. At lunchtime, the lucky neighbor brought a bouquet, placed it on the doormat carefully, and then left smiling.
(Translated by Roberta Ana-Maria Gulerez / 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. 
