For years I painted all kinds of paintings, one more beautiful than the other. I created some invented landscapes, mythical animals, distorted portraits, realistic nudes, without resounding success. Now, at the end of my life, I decided to draw a
self-portrait. I was standing in front of the white canvas, with no idea. I didn't even think it would be the
best-selling painting. I looked at the fine white canvas and wanted to wrap my whole existence in it, so I pulled a small red stripe in one corner. Me and the universe.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Georgiana Mihai / 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. 
