He gently cracked the door and glimpsed her in the window, staring into the stars, as if the soul had broken away from its earthly body and was seeking another in which to lie down. During the day, the icon of his heart was as sad as a dried tear, and during the night, it sprinkled the sky with saints. The sorrow flashed through him up to his heels. He ran, opened the window and searched in the distance. Nothing. Only when he closed it did he see the star swaying, gathered as if from all around in a pinprick. Daddy, don't break it, if you do it won't come back to life.
(Translated by Alina-Dorina Nicolae / 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. 
