The Panda fountain pen with rubber pump was a pink bear. When it was open, the bear hopped on one leg. When it was closed, it got shorter so that it could fit into a first graders fist. The screw cap creaked when screwed on. In the third grade, at the calligraphy course, the bears round ears have been chewed. His silver bowtie fell in a pencil case fight in the seventh grade. The nib broke after the
eighth-grade exam. Then, the bear got lost. The signature of the parent remained, a small grade for behaviour. Chinese writing, indecipherable.
(Translated by Diana Simulescu / 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. 
