The salt was his garment. Fine, shaky streaks were forming an unreal map, dazzling in places. Like a magic thread, he was drawn to the darkness of the rest. Soft, tanned skin. The wrist. The indiscernible purpose of the breasts in the cup of his hands. A pepper chocolate flavour on the tip of the tongue. The sea lazily touched her, letting her dream. He was playing. Am I tickling you? he asked her when he saw her smiling. She opened her big eyes, looked at the sun, feeling its burn, and whispered, No, it feels good.
(Translated by Monica-Andreea Gaman / 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.
