And he went silent. He gazed into my eyes as if he could hear my thoughts, smiled and got up from the table. Then the stranger walked slowly towards the bartender and whispered something in his ear. In the background, a feminine voice from long ago starts telling a musical story on a vinyl record. I am having a déjà vu, floating in an unknown sea, only the sky above me. I feel everything expanding inside my heart and my body becomes just a memory when I take the shape of water. Wave after wave keep lifting me higher, throwing me in his eyes, my final destination.
(Translated by Ruxandra Adriana Dodoiu / 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. 
