How many times do you come to the sea in a year? Once? Because you are employed and have a family. Do you have 50? If you're lucky, you'll stay on the beach a maximum of 20 times. Is that what you call love and longing? I lowered my guilty eyes. The sand gathered slowly at the bottom of the tub. He was talking about us. The tourist and the sea. I could count on the fingers of the hand with which he held the shower for how many years we knew each other. And on our toes every time I will se her, like now, through the steam. Or it was just the haze that had set on my brain realizing.
(Translated by Andreea Theodora Drăgan / 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 May 2023, the group has 11,260 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. 
