The sound of the babbling stream was mixing with the buzzing noise coming from a small radio playing Dvořác. It smelled like autumn light, and the leaves under his ribs tasted like rust. When he was done weeping his thoughts over brooks and rivers, his steps took him home. The blank page smelled like oud, and his gold pen started to sketch the contours of two bodies lost one into another, sunk in debauchery and doomed to perdition. The ink was struggling under his shaking fingers. It's not you here, my dear. I'm leaving to lose myself into a star which rejoiced at my name.
(Translated by Elena Florea / 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 October 2021, the group has 7.275 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. 
