You can go anywhere but stay away from the Valley of Remembrance. And just as in ancient fairy tales, the young man leaves his father's house and walks straight to the place he was supposed to beware of. From the first step, the earth began to soften, the heat subsided. He headed straight, and a soft, damp green carpet came under its burned soles, while a dizzying flagrance disturbed his senses. He raised his eyes: the sky was an intense azure with white spots. He remembered childhood's story of a world of water, forests and free people.
(Translated by Iuliana Danciu / 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 June 2021, the group has 6.650 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. 
