28o à l'ombre, rustles in the background. I sit naked on the floor. I look at the pattern and think about Henry. He said that the pattern of the carpet was the answer. James, on the contrary. That the magnet on the fridge was. Both the carpet and the magnet each have a blue eye. I breathe slowly and try to open the Eye. His hand slides in curls down my back and leaves drops of sweat behind it. When the drops cover me, it says: do you want more or have you grown enough? I go to the fridge, but the years have passed, the drawing is too small for me and the Eye is nothing but a blue fish.
(Translated by Mălina Ioana Butaru / 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.
