All of sudden, all turned silent. The flames,
red-orange, warmless, turned still too, their crackling got lost between the cast iron eyelets. The metal sound of the pans was gone too, not even the light touch of the yellow sponge on the cracked enamel could be heard. The cutlery's quarrel was already just a memory. I pour myself some a stem glass of white wine, I lay on the beige countertop and I stare into the neon. Its light pierces the void. It's so quite I feel like making a potato stew.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Denisa Neagu / 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 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. 
