When he gave me the gift, my knees were shaking and I would have recited all the poems in the world to him. If I'd let myself go, I'd imagine playing with my fingers through his messy beard. I loved the shabby suit he only wore once a year, I wanted him to take me in his arms and dance to the most romantic song in the world.
You're the first, the last, my everything. He was the first unsuitable man I fell madly in love with, not the last. That I loved Santa Claus is no big deal. But he was the father of a kindergarten classmate.
(Translated by Lorina Xiaoyu Hou / 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. 
