We'll still be friends, he said. We'll go out for coffee. Even if we're not a couple anymore. She wiped away her tears. She touched his hand. His Chaplin tattoo dropped like a sentence. The ink winked at her. Another man trying to lie to her. Trying to make her believe that a seven-and-a-half-year love could dissolve in a cup of coffee. Like the spoonful of sugar in a diabetic's dream. She stroked Chaplin's top hat, knowing it was the last time. No thanks, my mother told me not to drink coffee with strangers.
(Translated by Andreea-Iulia Ciucă / 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. 
