I had checked in. I had handed in my luggage. He stood with me in the security line for a while. I couldn't watch him walk away. I wanted so badly to give up on leaving and run towards him that I even took a few steps back. Four months later, five friends, an ultra-crowded capital city, a blooming meadow, a tea plantation like the waves of a calm sea, a sandstorm and a motorbike with love (爱) as its number plate taught me that the heart is at home here and there too.
(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. 
