We live in an adobe house. It's winter and in order for me to forget how cold it is, I look at the clock on the wall. I am afraid someone will steal it. It's made of gold. When I had a high fever and almost died, my uncle told me that my great grandpa was a giant and that that had been his wristwatch. That night I saw him carrying my grandma in his palm. I shouted at him to not stomp on me. When he saw me, he smiled at me and gave me his watch. It was heavy and I could barely carry it. Time froze. When I came back to my senses, the clock on the wall had run out of batteries.
(Translated by Alexandra Handrea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 September 2021, the group has 7.150 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. 
