This is a story about a pumpkin. Secular edition. A single pumpkin is looking for his other half. He had been feeling incomplete since the last pie. He was empty inside, like somebody had taken out his insides looking for seeds. Or like he'd been crushed. Piece of cake. He was merely a shadow of his former self, a beautiful round pumpkin sparkling since he started to ripen. Don't mock him, calling him little pumpkin or turning him into a scarecrow. He is a Pumpkin, who just ripened, finding another half. From now on he will bravely split in two. Two pumpkins of solitude.
(Translated by Bianca Ioana Prisecaru / 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 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. 
