Some buildings had a stone Cupid before them. I have learned that where I see such a statue implies that love takes birth in that place, which inevitably leads to marriage. I ran away on an island. At night I fell asleep with a foxy, toothless local woman. In the morning, in front of the hut, I found a Santa Claus made of sand. The girl told me that it was Santa who had fulfilled her wish. And that we will be together our entire lives. I threw myself into the sea. I bumped my head by a coral cluster. I was petrified.
(Translated by Zahra Kazemi / 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 March 2021, the group has 4.300 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
