Your little sister is afraid to walk through the water, because, look, those green monsters want to bite my leg, she shouts, and starts crying, and big tears roll in waves, but it's okay, you hear yourself telling her, and you take her hand, they're just algae, they also live in the sea, like fish which you're not afraid of, they won't hurt you, they just want to play with you, come on say bye-bye to the algae, I don't want to play with you today. Suddenly, her crying stops, and on the beach, a child walks hand in hand with a grown up.
(Translated by Diana Stănescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan / 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. 
