It was so cold, you can hear the noise of the cracking stones on the numbed street. The old man bent over and threw wood in the fire that burned and rattled in the clay fireplace. He was heading to the peephole where he and his old woman used to watch together the first snow of the year, when she lived. A bluish snowflake was floating in the air as if it was not sure whether to continue the way to earth or to remain suspended by silver rays of the Moon. He smiled bitterly and grumbled: Look, Rădină, it started to snow.
(Translated by Cristina-Nicoleta Costache (Mircea) / 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. 
