That's how long it took to meet this blonde. Then half a century 'til she paid me any attention, three more decades 'til we held each other's hands, and 5 more years 'til we kissed on the bridge and the lips. Then, time started quickly going by, like somebody had opened wide the neck of our hourglass. Within half an hour we were counting contractions, within 15 minutes we were running along our grandkids in the yard, in the last 30 seconds we crammed in about ten thousand iloveyous. Now there's only half of me, and time passes slower and slower once again.
(Translated by Bianca Ioana Prisecaru / 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 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. 
