I was adoring her ginger mane and the joy in her eyes. She was not a young girl anymore, but her eyes were shining even brighter, and her rough smell, like musk, tingled my senses. There might have been something smouldering insider her, a fire, a scorching heat, I have no idea, because I could feel a flame getting under my skin and then gently melting into my soul. I'm falling in love, I told her one morning, convinced to end this story. You think you are, she told me, while flames were coming out of her nose. I'm an old mare, I eat embers and you have a princess to save. Hop on me. And she spread her wings.
(Translated by Ana Spînu / 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. 
