At the window in the castle tower I rewind the stories experienced and unexperienced. I count the springs that have passed like a nightingale's flutter that brought me an offering at the beginning of each April, a song decorated with meticulous phrases. It's the first spring I haven't seen the snowdrops. A bad sign, the woman I used to be would have said. I'll see them next year, reassures me the one I am. Yesterday, the craftswoman came to see me. I made a trade. I gave her the much-coveted room. The mirror reminds her every day that she's the most beautiful. She gave me the sky. And I'm the most Alive every day.
(Translated by Angelica Ioana Curcan / 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. 
