Asked the old man with the snowy beard. The kid shrugged and, without looking up, started tracing circles with his foot on the cloud he was standing on. The old man grabbed his chin and lifted up his face, locking eyes with him. One day you will grow up and understand that you've got a great destiny before you, and you cannot play with hearts. Get it? The kid sighed, shook his head, troubled, then did a one-eighty. He plunged his arm up to the elbow into a floating cloud and, pulling out a bow and quiver, he hightailed it to Earth, snickering.
(Translated by Ioana Ștefan / 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. 
