He taught me how to trap animals if I'm ever lost in the woods, how to trap the perfect woman in my heart if I'm ever lost in life, how to make fire with nothing, how to extinguish fire with nothing, how to read my way out in the stars and how to shove the clouds aside when I can't see the sky. He left on an autumn's day, 90 springs old and with a face as bright as a summer's day. Now it's winter. It's been three months since he left, but grandfather still guides me around the skies, the eighth star of the Greater Bear.
(Translated by Carla Bețianu / 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 January 2023, the group has 10,220 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. 
