This is not your
great-grandfather in the picture, my grandma said a while ago. Your real
great-grandfather was a magician, not a gentleman, but he quarreled with the son of a nob leman for mom since he got her pregnant so she was promised to him. I grew up by myself. After I was born, she would walk aimlessly through the fair, asking about the magic door she could go to him through. Now I understand her, oh, the only trick in life is to love fully today. What stays after it, it's just a hole in a topper hat where no rabbits or butterflies come out of. And her sigh stayed in my blood for a while longing.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Georgiana Mihai / 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 August 2021, the group has 7.000 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 Ficțiuni Reale. 
