The mirror turned the image bright, translucent, so I knew I was going to change. It had been raining non-stop for three years, and my body had been getting shiny. All the lime eaten off the walls hadn't warmed my gaunt skin either. The dampness had soaked every last cell, but even so, it would be nothing. But the night it appeared to me, first in my dreams, then in the window, I began to grow scales. He had the deception of a whisper with the ripple of a wave, the amphibious man. I followed him dreaming still as I took the form of water.
(Translated by Lorina Xiaoyu Hou / 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. 
