A turtle fresh out of the egg listens to the call of the endless water towards which it goes melancholically, although it has never seen it. Ravenous seagulls fly nervously above, waiting to catch it in their steel beaks. On the hot sand, their shadows look like traps over which the turtle passes, knowing that under the green bells of the ocean she will be able to go up, down and let herself be carried by the currents which can take it anywhere as long as it imagines it is a butterfly or a star. On the other shore, I imagine I am the turtle.
(Translated by Claudia Cioplea / 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 June 2022, the group has 8,500 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. 
