The silence is deafening. Except the phone is pinging. He's texting me. From the delegation. Poem of the day? Look out for a bill for the child's braces. That's all. That's how we live now. That's how we spend our time on earth. With our feet firmly rooted into it. Rooted to the waist in immediate realities. I go to the fridge and take out the beer bottle I opened yesterday. I throw my head back and gulp it. I throw everything I can into the gaping mouth of the inner void. It's ten in the morning. So what? Young mom having a beer. Requiem for the past.
(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 June 2023, the group has 11,430 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. 
