The cakes are kneaded and the cabbage rolls are ready, Christmas trees all wrapped up and at the gates the sound of little voices. In the fever of preparation, under the clouds that contain angelic flakes, all wounds are forgotten. It's a starting spirit at the end of each year. The beginning of the love that was born in the cave, that which came down from eternity to say to us, Behold, I am with you all the days until the end of the age. Since then, the evil loneliness has moved into crying and gnashing of teeth. I make my heart a manger and wait for the birth of eternity in it.
(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. 
