Once upon a time, there was a yarn ball that couldn't find its way. One day, a little girl named Tincuţa learned how to knit and transformed it into a hat. The yarn ball was very happy. The other yarn balls eagerly approached her. Ever since then, any piece of string that she could get her hands on was transformed into something brilliant. And so, she aged, twirling her needles day and night. When her life was near its end, the yarn ball called out, c'mon let's turn back the time. And all of the strings had unwoven themselves until Tincuţa was 10 years old again.
(Translated by Jin Cristian Yang / 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 May 2021, the group has 6.400 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
