The pretzel, that's what he called her, and he adored her. They'd meet night after night and talk about everything. They gave each other thoughts. And they laughed, oh, God, how they laughed. They only saw each other in pictures, but they fell hopelessly in love there in the Northern Lights. They touched each other only through music. She knew how it would end, but all he wanted was to let him love her. The dawn caught them unawares. They didn't care, they had each other. But one day the virtual room closed. That's where they found each other, that's where they lost each other. And they never knew each other again.
(Translated by Angelica Ioana Curcan / 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. 
