I reluctantly swallow the black air. The moon looks at me with pity, she has no idea how much I hate being felt sorry for. Be more hopeful, she whispers with no echo. If only it were that simple, just like in Kintsugi. To be able to take and glue shards back together with gold leaf and to say: look at me, I'm almost brand new! Love me. That fucking almost. You've gone through life in vain if you didn't live it. I lived it, so intensely I tore my heart to shreds. I gave it all away, in pieces. What now? I'll swallow the moon, so she could take my heart's place.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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. 
