When Odette met the love of her life for the first time, her heart was struck by a light so bright it was hard to bear. Exhilarating and painful as an electric shock, this hope that this light would brighten up her darkest corners was exulting, like a bow coming back to its original shape after being under pressure for so long. The magic of coming back to herself didn't come true though, because Siegfried had fallen in love with the darkness in her, condemning her to the eternal ambiguity of tar. She decided to let herself go, and get wrapped up by a boa with black feathers, until she could breathe no longer.
(Translated by Carla Bețianu / 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. 
