She told me that we needed to take a break. My eyes fell on my cup. I began to second guess my past. I couldn't figure out why the cherry blossoms had shaken over us two nights ago. Or why the swallows never returned to live by the eaves. Or that summer morning by the sea when I missed the sunrise on the beach because I had a migraine. I didn't pick up on it last fall either, when the wine went bad shortly after I put it in the barrel. I stirred it in the cup. I looked up and asked for the bill.
(Translated by Anca Maria Florea / 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. 
