I met her on the train, she was apuppet girl, she was repeating Cinderella in the compartment without spectators. She let me in, although I had a train ticket, but not for theatre, she liked my thick framed glasses, my messy beard, the low voice, I liked her thin waist, her worried look, the hands on the ceiling holding the puppets. We laughed, we talked, we whispered, we touched by mistake, while we weren't paying attention. When we came down, she suggested to meet there over a year. It's eight point zero. I think I'll wait for her a bit longer.
(Translated by Ema-Teodora Rădulescu / 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 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. 
