With the tip of his sandal he tries the line where the cobble ends and the nimbus begins, drowned in the fight. First with one foot, then the other, he steps vigilantly over nothing. A snippet of wind buries it in a flowing dust. From the bank of the earthy river a man with a moonshine and a dog asks if he has money to cross it. Sure. She does. She gives him the palm of her hand with exactly as many coins as she would have paid for two
chocolate-raspberry cone cups if she'd been more careful as she crossed to the ice cream shop.
(Translated by Oana Irina Oprea / 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. 
