This is just the way that we are. Begat by a Father, all-knowing and all-creating. And by a Mother, Gaia. They gave us the inheritance of the skies, the wind, the seas and the earth. Naturally, having come from the middle of the universe, and too proud, we fought among each other and backed away. At equal distances. We turned our Father's circle into a square. We cut corners into our Mother's sphere. We counted degrees and amicably cut them in 4. And we each received new names. North, South, East and West. We turned a round planet into four cardinal points. Playing the coordinates. Four intersecting siblings.
(Translated by Marta Fulga / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by conf. dr. Daria Protopopescu / Edited 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 October 2022, the group has 9,400 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. 
