The wet, blackish-brown concrete glistens with reflections like a river of oil under the wheels of cars. Traffic jam of statues; hazy shadows waiting illuminated by headlights. Olly runs, crosses without looking at the people crowded on the pavement; they remain fixed at the tail of the gaze. Arriving at the staircase of the building, sniffling, she climbed the steps two at a time; the air, once musty, smells of laundry detergent. Leaning against the door, she closes her eyes and remembers his palm on her right breast, cast by the shadow of the half-open door. Olly, you have a fever.
(Translated by Iuliana Mocanu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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. 
