She passed the embarking gate without looking back. She was looking in front of him, naïve and innocent, to an uncertain future, with a suitcase in one hand and the passport in the other. If she delayed his departure, that town and its people would have killed her. Boarding in the plane, he left behind everything that he had, her entire past. The take-off to the new life was smooth. The same as crashing. The fragile balance of the Universe was re-established, and she was a pawn in her own chess game, the one that was taken out off the playfield. That's what weak people get.
(Translated by Maria Cătălina Moisescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected 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 February 2023, the group has 10,500 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. 
