At the edge of the village, on the side of the road, further up the hill from where the thief met the fool, there I saw Ottilia. Her sneakers betrayed her existence, leaving tracks in the asphalt melted by the midday sun, and scorched shoulders urged you to sin. I had a flat tire, but her cherry-stained skirt changed my luck. Where did you come from, sweet chimera? An enigma, a mystery, a fairy come to quench my thirst. I left the car there and drank greedily from the cup of happiness. Or maybe I got heat stroke, who knows.
(Translated by Angelica Ioana Curcan / 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 September 2022, the group has 9,250 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. 
