The conveyor belt starts suddenly. My bottle of red wine does a pirouette and falls over the front guy's groceries. In an instant, a carton of milk is at our feet. We duck too late. His hiking boots and my beige, suede boots are all white. Our eyes meet and galaxies explode between us. You owe me a coffee, lady, I hear him as if in a dream. I don't know what happened next, but I'm writing to you from Everest. The sun has just risen. We're having coffee with all the stars in it.
(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. 
