With the bird in his chest barely fluttering, he scanned the stares of the others, and in her eyes he lingered until he caught her sniggering laughter, then pretended to look away. The little thorny rose, hidden in his jackets so that no one would make fun of him, was piercing him. At least once he'd hear his name in play, that he knew then who to call out.
F-boy, he heard as if in a dream, wincing. He shuddered, made faces. Opened his mouth, face with, failed. I think my mother called me to lunch.
(Translated by Andreea Tobă / 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. 
