Mine have been all eyes and ears for decades, so much so that sometimes you can see them, when the moon shines through the small backyard window. Sometimes I pretend I'm asleep, just to hear them whispering to each other: Her granny, Iozefa, used to read stories out loud so she wouldn't hear her own loneliness after the sounds of gramps building the world ceased. This little one twists lives around in her thoughts, brightens them up and sends them to her old folks, like stars falling from the earth to the skies. Her granny moulds them into bricks and her gramps builds another house, so he has plenty of room to welcome everyone.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Ciucașu / 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. 
