Christmas comes in three days. I'm meditating in a bathroom full of spices and bubbles. At my door, a voices of church girls. It's been a couple of years since this only happens in such moments. This time, I don't want to miss it. I get of the bathroom and I open the door. I'm exactly as I was the day I got baptised. Embarrassed, the priest did not expect this. He sings quickly, hits my head with a plant bundle full of holy water and runs away. I feel purified like a Tibetan monk, similarly dressed in something almost orange, the bathrobe is spreading aromas of musk mixed with basil.
(Translated by Ana Spînu / 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. 
