Every morning I would stare at my tired face in the balcony window as I stirred my coffee. Four thousand days of practicing my smile, wondering when I would be present in my own life. The shoulder pain, the only kind of pain I had. In the apartment across the street, the woman in the mirror was filling a glass of water and seemed to be laughing. Maybe she was talking to her boyfriend. For every sad smile in my corner, there was a real one in hers, which I would place on my wound. Life as a zero-sum game.
(Translated by Raluca Ioana Crucerescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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. 
