We went to bed mad at each other, in adjoining rooms, but on fairly distant planets. It took me a while to fall asleep, wandering the pitch black hole in which my soul was slowly slipping, a loveless desert that was opening in front of me. The few hours of tiring sleep were interrupted by the ringing phone at an hour that never bodes well. I answer and I hear my mother ranting and raving because father suddenly left the bed they had shared an entire life. A stab in the heart and loneliness. The cruel irony of a love not ended by death, but lost living. Dark night.
(Translated by Mara-Sabina Rolea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan / Edited 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 October 2022, the group has 9,400 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. 
