She won't be catching New Year, he heard mother sayon New Year's Eve, so before midnight, he kept on waiting. In his right hand he held tight the handle of a butterfly net, and in his left a lantern. He looked like an elf willing to accomplish great things, but he had an extremely important mission: to catch New Year himself for Ursa, their old cat, if she couldn't. When he woke up it was already morning, and Ursa was nowhere to be found. He grumpily got near the window and looked up to the sky. On a cloud, Ursa was soothingly purring.
(Translated by Mara-Sabina Rolea / 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 January 2022, the group has 7.830 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. 
