He was once a carpenter. One day, a small splinter of fig wood entered his finger, and the harder he tried to pull it out, the deeper it went. Soon, the chip reached the heart, took root and grew until it became a tree in its entirety. Love, hope, joy, and other migratory birds had made their nests in its branches. Through hatred lurked hatred, fear, sadness, and other birds of prey. When the man was trapped in a tree, his people put a fence around him and called him barren.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Mușetescu / 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. 
