Between the sandal straps, the flesh throbs as if trying to escape, but she knows that once she takes them off, she can't put them back on. The coach waits for over two hours. She ticked St. Peter's, the Pantheon, Trevi, the Column, the Colosseum, off her insanely long list. She didn't get the chance to wander around. Even more pressing than the heat of the sun on the back of her neck was the question: what if I never come here again? At tables around the square, posh people drink posh things. She cracks open the pull tab of a cold beer and gets over her shame: she submerges her sandals in the fountain basin.
(Translated by Raluca Ioana Crucerescu / 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. 
