The rain has stopped. Mara looks out the window for a long time. The sky, in its bounty, draws a rainbow for her. With every breath the silence is growing. George has gone out to get cigarettes. Shaman purrs absently on the armchair upholstered in sky-blue vinyl. Until today he measured his life by the Indian pattern, seven by seven. Years. Today he closes his seventh cycle, the last in which his heart beats red. From tomorrow, on her way to the sun, she'll turn the colour of chindia. The biopsy results are burning hot in the ashtray. The rain has stopped.
(Translated by Delia-Maria Cocoș / 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. 
