A hundred people were walking behind the hearse. They were each holding a book and reading, no one was allowed to cry. This was one of Gheorghe's wishes, he who for 60 years was the village antiquarian. A loner who didn't say much. The village children were fascinated by how focused he was on books, and his small eyes almost seemed closed the entire time he was reading. Now he is to slowly descend into the pit. Instead of flowers, people adorned him with books. He very much wanted to decompose among stories.
(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. 
