As soon as he felt the cold water touch his skin, his wings began to grow. He didn't know where it came from or where it was going. She just let herself be swallowed by the waves. Her eyelids were now growing shells and her lips were slowly turning blue. Seahorses rested on her breasts, and thoughts had long since left her for a wise octopus. She was no longer afraid that she would never get to the surface because she had grown accustomed to being carried to the depths. Like an atom, in this undiscovered abyss. No, she wasn't drowning, she was transforming.
(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. 
