Morning came scratching through the window, accompanied by light. The phone was already showing messages. I turned the age at which I stopped waiting for That Day. I would've given half of it back, but the Old Guy doesn't make deals with time. I was crawling towards the kitchen to quench my thirst for coffee. The doorbell and the sound of steps moving away deterred me. I opened the door confused. There was a cardboard box on the doorstep. A whimper indicated the presence of a soul. Two little black button-eyes watched me shyly. Whoever sent it remained a mystery, but Happy somehow made a deal with the Old Guy. That Day is every Day.
(Translated by Claudia Cioplea / 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. 
