I left Cristina in a puddle of tears and went back to that naughty little girl, Roxana. There was something about her that gave me no peace, only inner wars and carnal desires entwined with a desire to run away. I kind of sucked at athletics, but my sour-faced wife, with her retired fox nose buried in Sherlock novels, had found out about our love affair from my spare phone. A phone which, like a teenage idiot, I had forgotten in the suit she had given me to take to the cleaner and collected herself. Roxana, I screwed up. Forgive me. You're gonna take your Baccalaureate exam in Bulgaria.
(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.
