As soon as we enter the chamber we are struck by the smell of wilted violets. The cards were shuffled swiftly between her ringed fingers. On an evening stroll, a man gazing up at the sky, alone, mutters the woman in a trance. I look dazedly at my friend, and I feel faint. On the way out I stumble over a black cat, eyes deeply phosphorescent, and I apologize. A car comes to a sudden stop, a man gets out:
Are you okay? I lose myself in his green eyes.
Now I am and we laugh about it. I'm holding a business card: Matthew, the phenomenologist of reading in the stars.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Batog / 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. 
