I am hugging a blue bird that is cuddling against my chest. It caches one of my hairs in its beak and starts to chew at it. After it gets bored, it puts its head on my neck and sits motionless, until I hear its breathing softly, regularly. Then, its wings start to twitch, as if it was flying in its dreams. We sit like this, a human stuck to a bird, in an antediluvian silence. Soon, our hearts start to pull on the lattices of the hemispheric boxes in which they beat. They set themselves free and start to dance. Like no one had ever done it before.
(Translated by Constantin Istrate / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. Daria Protopopescu / 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. 
