Do you want anything else? No, thanks. Left alone in the large room, in the poor light of the candles that did not reach the other end of the table, he approached the wall full of photos. In all, a young man at 30 appeared, in the midst of the people listening to him, in various places, on the seashore, in an olive garden or among simple clay houses. He lingered in front of the wall as if he had been waiting for something, perhaps even the deaf wail that he finally heard: Eli, Eli. He smiled in his beard and blew in the small lamp. The boy grew up.
(Translated by Laura-Elena Dobrin / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 March 2023, the group has 10,790 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
