We sit together on the couch, silence is deadly. The silence of the lead starts to hurt me. I need air. I go out. I cross a street, a neighbourhood, the whole city. I get to the door of my ex-love. I want to come in. I want life again, absurd quarrels, laughter to heaven and back, I want Christmas every season. Something stops me. I'm going home. The loneliness is still there, on the couch, smoking a cigar. I take her by the hand and get into bed. We hold ourselves in our arms until suffocation. With it, life is comfortable, predictable, criminal.
(Translated by Laura-Elena Dobrin / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 March 2023, the group has 10,790 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
