He could never live his life in the sight of the world, like any other man. From the age of 15 he had eaten his food and drunk his drink, between the waters and the sky. During the 3 months of the year spent on land, he moved his loneliness to the heart of the forest. When I received the envelope with the key, I knew he was gone. I was the only one he trusted to handle his manuscript. The sun set twice over the fir trees until I turned the last tab and realized that through any seas or forests we carried our loneliness, we are all in the same boat.
(Translated by Carla-Marina Ştefănescu / 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. 
