I don't know if you believe me, but when we were younger, he was a very colorful spirit. He loved life. He'd go out in the garden as soon as the sun came up, dance under umbrellas when it rained, and fly kites in the wind. Until one day, when life itself broke his heart. Since then, he only sees the clouds, his mother told me. He doesn't even leave the house anymore. So I decided to do some nice things for him, to bring him a little joy. Yesterday I left an umbrella with butterflies on his door, like the ones he had as a child. Today, I drew a pink sun on his mailbox. I'm not giving up. We're neighbours, after all.
(Translated by Andreea Ciubuc / 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. 
