He was old, tall and scrawny, with shoulder-length hair and the aura of a poet. My Romanian teacher. The one who, sometimes, during breaks when I sat by the tall school window, would come silently beside me, place his black briefcase on the heater, and gaze with me always forward, towards who knows what fantasies of adolescence dancing on an infinite horizon. At prom, he asked me to dance and said goodbye. I kept silent, ashamed that he was left alone, and I was really moving on. Farewell.
(Translated by Camelia Diaconu / 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. 
