Matei is a little boy. Under his mother and grandmother's protective umbrella he learned his guardian angel's prayer. And about the sky. His father bought him a telescope and showed him the sky from a different angle. Matei is fascinated by Saturn's Rings and equally by the Creator's sky. He is a wise child. He knows that he'll be missing the grand finale his mother talked about. Under the shield of his naivete, displayed in his fluttering lashes, the only thing that concerns him is the time in which he'll reach Calypso and get one of those fascinating rings. Matei is no more. A little boy.
(Translated by Georgiana Morozii / 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. 
