They met in Rome. Fontana di Trevi. He admired her rebel curls. He turned around to toss the coin and instead saw the most beautiful, emerald green look, with naughty freckles and dimples. Then vortex: holiday, going back home, engagement, PHD, marriage, the fatidical comeback to Rome where she was supposed to give him the big news, the pushcart, the bitter cherry ice cream, the motorbike that lost control, the rebel curls touching the cubical stones, the emerald eyes smiling faintly and his heart turned to ice.
(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. 
