I draw frantically on my philosophy notebook. The teacher, bow- legged and fat, talks about the sacred and the profane. Popa, what is profane? You're for the fans, whispers her colleague. When I'm pro(fan)e, madam. Deadly glare. He goes on shyly, it's the teacher's augmentative. Hey, you guys think you're smart? Ilie, what are you scribbling there? He's looking at my paper, like in a mirror. He sees two brackets - the legs, a big circle - the head, an even bigger one - the bottom. I've sketched the last day, the boundary between sacred and profane. She lost herself in the drawing, meditating.
(Translated by Anca Maria Florea / 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. 
