There once was a river that separated two lands. I remember it as if I have seen it in another life. That life was immortal, the only fragrant one. The river smelled like cold and white stones. On one side of the river, there was a boy who looked like a gingerbread man dipped in warm milk. On the other side, there was a dog, a bunch of wax cherry flowers and rain. They were staring at each other motionlessly. The moment one of them was to cross the river towards the other smelled of damp eyes and hope. Come here. Gingerbread with wax cherry flowers.
(Translated by Cristina-Bianca Ion / 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 May 2022, the group has 8,350 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. 
