Gavrilă was a man who had been through many lonely situations and whose face lacked any fears. He walked steadily along all kind of seen and unseen paths, and he trod the gullies with an unbeatable calmness. After the rain falling like a tearful blast from an unwept eye, seen and unseen found his soul's garden flooded. But he did not turn away, but angrily lifted up all the water, like a piece of unspoiled tin, and quickly shoved all his anxious mind under it, as if he had swept the lint of the day under the carpet. Then he stepped through the water to pick his tobacco.
(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. 
