At first it is easy to spot. In sudden frowns, in shouts with outraged
wide-open eyes, in the way it analyses its hands, baffled, in the cries with the whole body tensed up into an exasperated arch. You assume it is an old soul, shocked to find itself in the warm pile of bones, muscles and skin, with an intoxicating smell of new. You see its claustrophobic struggle, you feel it stretching, filling its self with much more than life. Until the day you can't find it anymore and it's only a baby, joyously babbling. Then you know it came to terms with it. You can feel the peace.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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.
