An X fell in love with an O. And life began drawing squares, lines, parallels. Sometimes you find yourself on a perpendicular line, and you look down, sigh, then go back where you came from. But more often, you hope for a square to become a circle. You're tired of the corners punished with solitude. Today an X learns from the O how to become a circle. Tomorrow an O learns from the X how to trace a line. It's a simple alignment in the school yard, when we played X's and O's under the desk one autumn. Please, let me play some more.
(Translated by Ioana Diana Sandu / 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 December 2021, the group has 7.750 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. 
