Serafim enjoyed life. In those three months since he was on land, there wasn't a day when the dawn didn't catch him, or when he didn't spill his guts through the harbor, or stepping out of the brothel with his cap on one eyebrow. His mother cussed him and his father smirked, his wife kept quiet and she prayed. Serafim knew his way around, because in those long months on the sea, the sweat would leave white trails on his black body of coke dust, down there, in the vessel's womb, to the ovens. Then, a zealously Serafim threw all of his sins committed on earth into the fire, shovel by shovel.
(Translated by Georgiana Morozii / 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. 
