It was the last book he ever gave me before he left for good. Sometimes I keep it on the nightstand next to my bed. Sometimes I fall asleep with it in my hands. I always take it with me on holidays. This book saw forests, hills, seas; it saw Paris. Yesterday I happened to forget it on a bench in a park. When I took off in a hurry to get it back, a child was sitting on the grass, ripping off its pages one by one. With a pang in my heart and tears in my eyes, I hurried to take my book back. Miss, d'youwanna make paper airplanes with me? We made about one hundred.
(Translated by Cristina-Bianca Ion / 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. 
