The young woman sat down on the grass, under the oak tree she had fallen in love with one summer night when she had first seen the Perseids. Nearby, loneliness unfurled in silken strands, dancing in the wind. She'd call, like Holden Caulfield, someone. She opened the phone. All sorts of names appeared on the screen. Called by them, fragments of conversations she'd had with people she'd once known burst into her memory. I'm not in the mood, she hummed, smiling. In front of her, a mute black bird floated on the lake. It was getting dark.
(Translated by Andreea Grințescu / 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 April 2023, the group has 11,000 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. 
