He wanted to be an artist until the last day. An artist perhaps of words or colours, perhaps of colours in words, to give birth to characters placed at the edges of the hours, to wander the seas in the footsteps of Ulysses, to reinvent Anna or Emma. Luckily, he had the people in his life and their advice. Yes, yes, he had no future as an artist. So he went to law school. Now he drags his robe through the courtrooms, carrying files of sad lives, with real Anna, Emma or James who were torn to shreds by the system and put back through personal development classes.
(Translated by Camelia Diaconu / 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 September 2022, the group has 9,250 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. 
