On either side of the river, piles of traveling journals stood tall, each claiming a history. I wandered with them, sometimes upstream, to the reeds, sometimes downstream, to the butterfly delta. I was the antiquarian of my life and I watched as some came and hurriedly skimmed through it, while others stayed to analyze it carefully, but they all left with only a mere leaflet. They liked the bargain, but pressed
forget-me-nots fell from their pages. One of them came back and couldn't find me anymore, I had moved my stall on a parcel filled with love.
(Translated by Ioana Diana Sandu / 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 April 2022, the group has 8,175 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. 
