I carefully step on the pathway. Branches reach out to me from all over, like arms that would like to embrace me and never let go. In the grass, foreign eyes twinkle. Above, towards the sun, never seen before birds fly, with wings in all the colours of the earth. Suddenly, the trees melt into the grass, the leaves rustle in waves, it smells of sea and I feel the first wave kissing my ankle. By the time I'm awake, a blue jellyfish is placing laurel-like seaweed on my forehead. We're off to a good start with this autumn.
(Translated by Cristina Ioana Bontea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 November 2022, the group has 9,580 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. 
