The olive trees filled the panniers overflowing with the songs of the elders,and stained the beaten hands; those that had fallen were crushed under the soles, and spread the smell of Provence. The women danced, plucking clothes on the wash-stone, scraping the rapier, impregnating the fabrics with the grease of soap brought from the port, then with herbs. The little boy came out of the larder in which he had piled himself, tastes the wine in the jug, and burst into the lavender field, looking at the sky full of boats on the lake under which his village was sunk.
(Translated by Luciana-Maria Buruiană / 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. 
