Look, he said tearing the heart in two, you get one, i get one. I took the piece of gingerbread and told myself that I would keep it for later. He ate his and said: 'it was so good. My heart stayed like that long after he was gone. He came back sometimes, during hot summers, but since he was so tall and always looked upwards, he didn't notice me anymore. Then I flourished and, by some miracle, I took off. When he did notice me, my piece of gingerbread had crumbled in a drawer. It was still me but just half.
(Translated by Alin Sescu / 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. 
