To all, he is the nutcase that waves his hands nonsensically in the intersection. The time lapse of the roundabout swallows him in its speed: sirens, migraines, drivers, connivers, opinions, pedestrians, kleptomaniacs and fellows. The nutcase waltzes hysterically amidst car honks, like a wind turbine during a storm. No, I'm not conducting the traffic, man. I'm just trying to stop your rat race, get you off of autopilot, even for that short moment when you laugh at me. Laughter gets us ahead, man, not cars. I want to make time laugh. I know, I'm a lunatic.
(Translated by Ana Stănilă / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 February 2022, the group has 7,950 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. 
