I was raised to be a sunflower. Where he is, there and back I go, never losing sight of him, the sun. I must bear fruit, squeeze oil and feed the family. I mustbe useful, but also beautiful. But I have poppy seeds, and there's nothing I can do about it. I lack robustness, andwith my colour I suddenly set fire to the fieldsin May. I have petals as soft as silk, but storms break them easily. I can't handle shocks very well and you can't keep me in the vase. Thoughts, emotions are just petals in the wind. There's always a spring coming.
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / 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. 
