I had sniffed her for a long time. She smelled of gray. Of sadness. Of loneliness. She would sit at a table, sipping coffee with her eyes fixed on her phone, and then she would leave. She stepped on shards of silence and words that had lost their colour in the light of a burnt-out bulb. She didn't see anything around her. No one looked at her. Or at me. That day, she placed her phone on the table and stared out the window, her gaze embracing a tree sick with life. I sat next to her. She stood up and said, you can come with me. Today, I saved a human. Today, I adopted the soul of a human.
(Translated by Lucia-Alexandra Brînaru-Mitrofan / 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. 
