The light had long since stopped coming through the
moth-gnawed curtain and caressing the books' wrinkled skin. The door, which once opened with a silver clink, was locked, and a large, already rusty padlock grinned defiantly at those who stopped for a moment in front of the small house, its roof pierced by the branches of a linden tree growing from within. Seen from a distance, it looked like a hunched old man, his hand outstretched to the sky, a threat or curse to the one who had let oblivion fall heavy on the myriad worlds of imagined conquest.
(Translated by Andreea Grințescu / 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. 
