I usually sniff out a woman quickly, like a greyhound on a rabbit trail. That's why I'm still unmarried. But then, that night, I guess the greyhound couldn't hold his liquor and all the tracks looked the same. In cases like that, fox, rabbit or swan, it was all the same to me. It was only in the morning, after she left, that I felt small and shadowless, and then I knew. It was as if I'd gone out of myself and left no phone number to call even for the holidays. Three perfect black feathers on my pillow don't even help me on Thanksgiving.
(Translated by Andreea Grințescu / 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 April 2023, the group has 11,000 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. 
