He had no one left. He spent his days on the same bench in the park, with a book in his hand. He read out loudly, and the time stopped so the people would listen. Children sat on his lap or on his shoulders just to see his finger slipping down the winged pages. The following day, more people would come, dragging after them other grandparents with books in their hands. The pages multiplied like Christian holidays, and the people grew wings and settled in his heart, which grew bigger and bigger.
(Translated by Liliana Popescu / 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. 
