I sit on a terrace near the Colosseum. The waiter stares at me. Fixed. Deeply. Blue. I don't know what I want. I'm hungry, but I'm sick of it all, I'm thirsty, yet I don't want anything to drink, I'm cold, but I feel like I'm on fire, I'm sick of life, but I miss it, I'm afraid to smile at the Italian, but I crave his lips. All right, I know what I want. I get up from the table and stop next to the waiter. I hug him; he seeks my lips. We're still kissing, somewhere in a monochrome macchiato-flavoured universe.
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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. 
