You couldn't see his lips move and yet he told the most beautiful stories. Passers-by lost track of time hearing about Mario's adventures in Sicily. Children would pull their mothers by the hand, refusing to go to the Negozio di Torte just to see Mario. The Necropolis of Pantalica was teeming with history and Mario had become the symbol of Syracuse. They had embraced him to such an extent that they made T-shirts with his face for tourists. One morning they found Luigi passed out on the cobblestones. Dead. He was the ventriloquist who had brought Mario to life.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Batog / 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 December 2022, the group has 9,880 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. 
