We've been distant for a while, we stopped looking for each other in bed, our eyes didn't meet any more, and the smile on our faces was gone. One night he got home late, extremely drunk, he entered the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee and forgot to turn off the stove. After puking in the bathroom for half an hour, he wanted to light a cigarette. A loud bang, fire in the kitchen engulfing the whole house. I left through the window, cause we'd been living on the ground floor. I called 122 after everything had already burnt. I threw the ash in all four directions, along with the love which had turned to ash.
(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 November 2022, the group has 9,580 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. 
