At first, I'm a fast mountain stream. Pristine trout flow with me downstream. Sometimes, we play hide-and-seek among the rocks. I slake the tourists' thirst and, at the foot of the mountain, that of the village gardens. Then, I merge with the river. I flow through the hills, towards the fields. There's a long way to the meadow, but I'm going to become an even bigger river. And a little further on, in the delta, I wander the canals dressed in water lilies, like a fairyland inhabited by wings. Only then do I grow up and receive dolphins. And I play with them. Hidden between the waves.
(Translated by Oana Ionescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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. 
