One day they came and told me: you have to choose one of us. I can't, I replied, I love you both equally. Let fate decide, they told me, and they wrote their names on a piece of paper, which they folded. Fate decided, thus, that I should extract Ana's name and stay with her. All I have left from Maria is the piece of paper she wrote her name and the thoughts about her at night. It is then, when I sit in the dark and knead between my fingers Maria's scrap, still folded, of course without knowing that
Ana's name is written on it.
(Translated by Andreea Laura Stanca / 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. 
