Grazia and Carlo, a beautiful woman with a young child. Don't you happen to know which way they went? The innkeeper pushed his beret and scratched himself on the greying head. They passed by the other day. By now they must be about where the rainbow rests, he said, pointing to the other side of the mountain across the valley. The soldier glanced towards the sunny green pastures, thanked him and turned on his heels in the damp air. I'm afraid you won't catch up on them. The closer you get, the more the rainbow moves, the old man said to himself.
(Translated by Oana-Roxana Dicilea / 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. 
