They had been dating for three years. She had fought with all her weapons, but above all, with love. He had left her because she couldn't bear him a child. She had shut herself up in her tiny flat on Kiseleff, suffering in silence and staring out of the corner of her eye at the Triumphal Arc. By day, the din of the road managed to distract her, but during the night it was eerily quiet. No voices, no din. No sirens. No sound of footsteps on the pavement. She would have accepted a three-way, that's how much she loved him. But with her best friend? She put the seashell to her ear. Maybe he's coming.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Batog / 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. 
