I was sure there had been a bakery there yesterday. Now it was an antique shop. There were books everywhere, on the shelves, on the floors, on the walls, in a mess reminiscent of autumn dresses. In one corner, I discovered the owner, a small man with a long white beard and a red caftan with white clouds and purple condors on his legs. He startled, opened a book and threw himself inside. Then all the books spread like butterfly wings and flew out through the cracked window, settling in the coffee shop across the street.
(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. 
