The retake gave me goosebumps. Entwined, we artistically practiced putting a strain on the coils. If I don't take care of it, you'll repeat the year, he whispered, hot breath on my skin. You should leave, I told him and got in the shower. The rest of the summer, the spoon sat up straight in my instant coffee, whipped with Cola. I spread my papers on the carpet and I sat in the middle, like in a ritual. The night flowed through my veins, the whipped coffee was all over the walls. I know what you did last summer, he said, in autumn, while stretching and squeezing the coil of a pen for show. You studied hard. You get a 9.
(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. 
