I want that flower and that flower only, said the princess, pointing to the Sun reflected in the water. The king's servants struggled to pull it out, but it slipped through their fingers just like fish. When the Sun has climbed the water lily leaf, then pick it up and bring it to land, said the witch. So the king did and brought the sunflower into the palace garden. And in the first year she bore thousands of children, in the second thousands more, and so on, until the whole kingdom was covered with flowers and disappeared forever.
(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. 
