One of them had been waking up in the mornings for years. Grumpy. Hurried. Sad. With her left hand, she was gathering the laundry. With her right she poured her coffee into the baby's unwashed milk jug. One day, she couldn't remember how, she ended up in the other. There she learned that wine was better from a tall crystal glass and that her red-nailed hand was made for forbidden caresses. From there she had left, on a summer afternoon, determined to choose. Home between the two of them, on a terrace, she whispered, An espresso, please. In a glass of wine.
(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. 
