On normal days he enjoyed feeling the wind and lured it to go under his coat sleeves, to make his trench coat flap as if it wanted to fly away. He savored it, he knew what he was doing. If there was a mound rising on a street, he would be on top of it immediately, for minutes on end. When the spell was over, he would grab his briefcase and go to fulfill a commission. On Gării Street, some hooligans mugged him and beat him up, finding nothing of value on him, but they were surprised when they found out his age.
(Translated by Beatrice-Ioana Huruială / 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. 
