He was born under a stone arch, on a cold, rainy day when everyone had rushed home to warm their bones by the fire. The woman's voice was silenced at the sight of the small pair of eyes which shone like two apatite stones, and her lips started to move, singing a lullaby. The verses flowed into the warm breast which covered the hungry mouth. Suddenly, an angelic warmth embraced themboth and the entire universe seemed to have squeezed inside their hearts. A bell jangled in the distance. Life was imminent now. They had all the answers.
(Translated by Valentina Mihai / 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. 
