At the crack of dawn, she made her way to the big tent that had been raised overnight. You were here last year too, said the gypsy. Did you bring what I asked for? She took three perforated coins out of her pocket and placed them in the woman's hand. She studied them carefully. Good job, she said. Are you sure this is what you want? Yes, she replied with enthusiasm. So you want to live by words. Each coin is a law. The first one, guard your ears against honey. The second one, look only with your mind. The third one, your heart is a gate. Come again next year with three stories. A good one, a bad one, and a never-ending one.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Batog / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 May 2023, the group has 11,260 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. 
