The sky fluttered silver in the dark blue of the night, a cold steam floated in the air, like an unwelcome embrace, the traveller with the cloak looked at the winding road between the stone walls, his sack hung heavy, like the earth in the cemetery, the brush lit up a window at the house above and the moon struck with a yellow and mute noise the cathedral bell and muted thoughts and footsteps. Is he leaving or returning? The painter stopped and burst out: you choose, imagination is our only miracle, otherwise we'd be blinder than the stones.
(Translated by Oana-Roxana Dicilea / 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 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. 
