A cold, biting wind was blowing in the harbour, and her thin dress clung to her body. She watched, like she did every year, the infinite horizon, and one thought kept bothering her: would she still be able to recognize him? It had been twenty years since he had promised her that he would return on her birthday. She began to pace to and fro across the small pier. When she saw the motorboat approaching, she quivered, and when she saw that it was him, in the flesh, setting foot on the pier, she rushed towards him angrily: now you come? He laughed, as tall as she remembered him to be, and then he took a teddy bear out of his pocket and gave it to her: I promised, didn't I.
(Translated by Andreea Teodorescu-Colciu / 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 December 2022, the group has 9,880 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. 
