She quickly realized she hadn't tied the knot with a man of flesh and thoughts, but a machine made for working and drinking wine. When she brought him food in the field, and warmly asked: how are you doing, he answered sharply: I'm working, what the hell else. Her words were flung against his cold shadow and shattered, falling. Here's the wall, she told herself with a shudder one day, with a belated surge of awareness, when he kissed her, and his kiss seemed to her as cold as mould. She left the wall inside the house, closed the door, wiped hard at her cheek and opened her soul's windows to the sun.
(Translated by Andreea Teodorescu-Colciu / 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. 
