The bed was so tall I could only land in it from the plane. The pillows, some hills covered in cotton and lace. The table, a huge island set on four pillars. Try as I might, I could never reach the door handle. 50 years later, I returned to that house. It was a ruin embroidered with cobwebs. This time I touched the door handle without difficulty and the bed was just a little taller than my knees. Coming from the walls that had begun to peel, I could hear my grandmother's voice, as she was carrying me to bed in her arms: Mr Airplane flying oh so high, come take Monica up into the sky, carry her on your wings and wish her sweet dreams.
(Translated by Valentina Mihai / 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 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. 
