All the Countess' friends gathered at the castle at the beginning of summer to celebrate another year of her being in our world. To my surprise, I found a garden full of weeds and locked windows. I was invited in by the exquisite lady herself, who greeted me with a pale aura. Dear friend, you are here because I don't want another year. I want you to help me. That moment remained frozen in my mind and you see it revealed in one of the paintings. The one who finds it is the only one who will go home.
(Translated by Claudia Cioplea / 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. 
