The young music teacher had been in the village for a month and he was hopelessly in love: her dark skin and her eyes resembling coffee beans made Melany stand out among the fair people in the village. Her speech was sweet and articulate, as if she'd been an actress in another life, and she could express her thoughts well. It was difficult to make herself heard with all the rumble around, but that didn't change anything. As much as the village wanted to make her believe she was broken, she went on being different and royal, like a black swan on a lake full of ducks.
(Translated by Carla Bețianu / 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. 
