A bad birth clock or the belly of the star too pressing, he didn't know, but, to protect him from temptation, his mother would cut off his shoulder blade stumps in his sleep, so that no feathers would grow. She feared for his unnatural thoughts. There is nothing out there, the stories of the ancestors said, but one day he plunged into the darkness of the universe and marveled as his thin body tore through the nothingness, with increasing force, to the light. Ha, it's the story of a dreamer like us, I laughed, cringing, but you pointed to the falling star.
(Translated by Florina Șamata / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected 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 February 2023, the group has 10,500 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. 
