The pioneers are the pride and future of the country, the propaganda used to say. They will shape socialism to communism on the fly. But until then, the pioneers had to study and understand the meaning of work. With joy and aplomb we went to work on the farms because the fun was at its best on the road. When I reached the cornfield, a sickle was placed in my hand and I was assigned two rows. Throughout my life, I understood that infinity is shorter than the two rows of corn that needed to be harvested.
(Translated by Lenuța Bejenaru / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 August 2022, the group has 9,000 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. 
