Today is Valentine's day. You're drinking a beer and watching the football match. I am sitting with the cat and scrolling on my phone. A typical domestic scene. I feel how the air is getting colder. It is not just a figment of the imagination, the cat started shrivelling as well, the water from the bottle turned into ice, everything in the room froze and I slowly detach from this body and leave. I watch myself how I open the door, I go down the stairs, and I don't know why I don't take the elevator, I arrive in front of the building and I take a deep breath. The snowdrops have bloomed outside.
(Translated by Beatrice-Ioana Huruială / 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. 
