I sat watching my puffs. The cigarette had long since gone out, and the time, no matter how illusory it was, had made its nest in the house of an amputated snail.
Freeze-frame. An idea. I would have wanted to say it was good, but there's a long way to go. I didn't know whether to write it or to verbalize it. What would it be like for all of us to publish and to buy ourselves? What would it be like for this group to become the most exclusive club, a home for creative souls, a bandage for wounded hearts, a dessert for young aspirants? What would it be like? Snail, snail, with no tail, and the time flies.
(Translated by Ecaterina Bucovanu / 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. 
