He was a watchmaker, but he fixed anything he could get his hands on. Many people crossed his path and left satisfied with his work. When he happened to be tinkering with something that was difficult to repair, he would get very angry and spend nights trying to get it right. He couldn't bear to walk out the shop the way you came in. It was his flaw. He said everything that isn't a being can be taken apart and put back together. He wouldn't dare to meddle with soul work, though he'd have loved to patch up broken hearts, but that's another story.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Marinescu / 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. 
