The man jumps into the boat and begins to paddle lightly, embarking on the great journey. Only a smooth, silver mark still connects him with the shore that gets farther and farther. Behind him remain the ruffled palm trees, the magenta flowers climbing on white houses, the windows with the blue shutters still drawn, the rooms with stale air, in which sleeping 'eroses' smile beside their mothers. In a few moments, his wife will wake up and find by the window overlooking the sea a freshly finished painting, in which a man jumps into a boat.
(Translated by Ecaterina Bucovanu / 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 July 2021, the group has 6.800 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. 
