That was the only place where Grandpa could wander off on his own. Among the dusty shelves of manuscripts, you could make out two familiar symbols: the pipe and the moustache. Tireless, he was the seeker of universal truth. The neatly stitched tabs between the grey covers absorbed him and opened up, calling him into a cave from which he forgot to come out or was no longer interested. The light dissipated and only then, he looked at his pocket watch silently and shook his head, shook off the entanglements of addiction.
(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. 
