When he found out they were both born on the same day, he asked her to be his girlfriend. He was born one hour earlier. We are meant to be, he said. But she turned him down. She explained to him that she could not love someone older than her. He then became an astronaut and flew into space for years, counted in seconds to earn an extra life of an hour. Then he came back to propose to her. It was one normal day of autumn when he arrived at her front door, among the others that were already there. Hardly had he seen those people when he felt deprived of one hour of his life.
(Translated by Luciana-Maria Buruiană / 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 January 2023, the group has 10,220 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. 
