It's so cool that your dad's a scuba diver; he swims with all kinds of fish. Mine works among the stars. He told me that sometimes when he sees them, his breath stops. He also told me they're very bright, they beam a special light. He likes to watch them as close as possible, in all their glory. Yesterday he brought me pictures of five of them. I glued them on the wall above my desk, next to the painting of our planet Earth. No, my dad's not an astronaut. He's a machinist on a film set.
(Translated by Adrian-George Ilinca / 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. 
