He was living alone, but everything was prepared, for the Lady was meant to arrive at any given moment. Nothing happened, she never came. At the end of the week, he would send the servants away then he would sit for hours on end contemplating the blue container, a Ming vase in which he kept a few colourful umbrellas that nobody was allowed to touch. They were hers. He didn't go out; he didn't talk to anyone. One day they found him in the street, he had jumped from the roof of the building with the vase in his arms. Around him there were blue shards and umbrellas that have never been opened.
(Translated by Jessica-Polixenia-Cristiana Copilaș / 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. 
