I had grown up timidly in the shade of a rhodium tree. My frail leaves intertwined with his, large, fleshy and so velvety. I was a local oddity, no one knew if I bore fruit, or if I had any use in this world. Love was born between us. I felt so many butterflies in my stomach. How lovingly he shielded me from the sun and shaded every leaf. But autumn yellowed them and they began to fall. For me it was doom. He looked at me with sadness and said, take it off. That was when my first leaf fell.
(Translated by Oana Ionescu / 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 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. 
