I get to see them only in the evening. I talk to them, I tell them what I did that day, I cook something, I prepare the staging. I put them at the table, I put drink, food, I say one thing or another. Then I find for each one of them a place for siesta and I relax. For some of then I have to give up sometimes, because they fall apart over time. I put them in bags and put them, dry as they are, still here at the end of the cellar. Periodically I bring new ones and experiment: I have to find in the end the perfect recipe for embalming.
(Translated by Iuliana Mocanu / 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 July 2022, the group has 8,750 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. 
