I sit on the porch of the cottage and drink my coffee looking at the neighbor's house. The other neighbors had hired me to keep an eye on him. I was told that this neighbor who had recently moved to the area was strange. He didn't talk to people in the community, and no one knew what he was doing. I had been studying him for two days, but I hadn't noticed anything special. That was until that night when a blinding light came down from the sky. It was a spaceship and the neighbor an alien. If you read this message, it means that I have gone to the stars.
(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. 
