Close your eyes, he said tenderly, and she did. She really believed that he would come back before she opened them. She kept her eyes closed, a thought, patience, a dream. She could see, past her eyelids, emerald worlds and winged horses and honey-sweetened whispers. She curled into herself and learned to live with her eyes closed, looking inside. The impatience would make her jump of happiness sometimes. When she opened them, he was smoking beside her, staring blankly into space and he couldn't understand why she was crying.
(Translated by Cristina-Bianca Ion / 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. 
