Turn your face to the sun and the shadows will remain behind you, Gelu repeated. A quote imprinted in his memory. He turned his face, blinded, closed his eyes, and in their darkness he saw the truth: 50 shades; seduced and abandoned women. The nights crackled the magma of uneasiness on his soul. For the purification of the spirit, he opened a salon for karma untangling by learning the unreceived lessons. He fell in love with 50 women, begging for them to make fun of his induced love by leaving him. With the money he earned, he bought himself a noble title.
(Translated by Mălina Ioana Butaru / 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. 
