I thought time was endless, like the sky is endless when you run under it. But watches have hands of fire that burn the seconds and look how much ash they leave behind. And look how the wind blows it away. And I wake up in front of the eternity called Love, and on my back I have the ladder from the endowment that I didn't know what to do with. Because I was getting up the steps to see if the bus was coming or if the boyfriend showed up for the date. And up there to breathe the rarefied air of exaltation. But she had come with only one instruction for use: the ascent to heaven.
(Translated by Tania Diniță / 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. 
