I have been climbing on a cork risen from nowhere for three days. Half buried in the smooth sand, it seemed to have grown there with roots too deeply spiked. At the beginning I ignored him and so did he. But during the night the splashes of the waves in the Moon light woke me and tempted me to follow the giant. So, I started to sniff around it. He was trembling, breathing hardly as if he had his last gasp. Look at me above. I take the bottle off him, there is a message. We both had a deep sigh. And I start swimming in the sea.
(Translated by Teodora Stoian / 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 November 2021, the group has 7.500 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. 
