Strangely long shadows stretched across the wall. He advanced panting on the steps, with small, barefoot footsteps, climbing to the top, in the hidden room known only to him. The place was dark, small and warm. It smelled of damp, old and quiet. There he weaved his own stories of shooting stars hanging from spider webs, for there the magic book, huge, with golden letters, awaited him. He locked the door coldly, removed the pickle jar, pulled out the
Greek-German dictionary from underneath, and began to read.
(Translated by Paula-Silvia Codescu / 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. 
