On the sparkling pavement the shadows of our umbrellas were overlapping and they looked like some huge bat wings. A moment, I tell my boyfriend, who remains with his lips pursed into the air, while I get my mobile out of my bag to capture the visual moment. What should I do since I have the spirit of an artist. He rolls his eyes, then he smiles waggishly slightly like a peacock, he grabs me possessively by the waist and kisses me hard. Our shadows were tangled for good. Look up, he says. Don't you want us to live under one umbrella from now on?
(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. 
