For about three years in a row, I was a star on a dusty stage, where I used to sing two hit songs at the top of my lungs: I know three colours in the world and Mărioară from Gorj. My soles were bare and kind of dirty, but I had cherry blossoms in my hair and forever ahead of me. A catatonic sort of ecstasy came over the public: a deaf dog and ten egg-laying hens. The fall began when Great Vasile the turkey, an incurable neurotic, came into the grandparent's yard. He seemed to compulsively crave my microphone, a corncob.
(Translated by Diana Mîndruță-Tănăsescu / 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. 
