When I first saw the second most beautiful woman in the world, I pulled the emergency brake and the rest of the passengers went ahead. We stood still, stuck next to each other in the shadows, in a dust cloud which intermittently sparked in shades of red under the warning signal lights. Around our bodies, luggage, bottles, phones and magazines went flying. In that first class high speed wagon, under the English Channel, I was coming from Paris and she was coming from London, or the other way around, who even knows anymore?
(Translated by Marta Fulga / 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. 
