It arrived on a Tuesday. Three bad hours. There had been several of them and they hung like a rag on the pendulum. It came in from God knows where, and it stopped right in front of my eyes. A small Martian came out of the ship. He sat on the edge of the plate with his feet hanging in the air, put his head in his hands on his knees, and sighed. I told him all about it. Sometimes it was flickering green, like fireflies, and the house was filled with a milky light that enveloped me like a cosmonaut's suit and other times he just sighed. He came again.
(Translated by Oana Georgiana Minea / 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. 
