We carry our lives in our arms like we take dogs to the vet. In the great waiting room no crying is like no other. Outside the blossom buds come out of the branches waiting to burst with joy then the fragile maples are mirrored in the blue sky. All that's left of my childhood home is a quince tree lighting up the window, and suddenly it flashes with sparkles of light. Under the icon a few flowers have wilted. In the candle the oil has Grown stale. Only four seasons rush through us and we don't know which one to tell the children about.
(Translated by Cristina-Nicoleta Costache (Mircea) / 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. 
