You try to squeeze through the crowd that fills the sidewalk in front of the school at lunchtime. The light, today stronger than ever, makes you walk as close as possible to the facades of the houses that line the narrow street. Looking at them, it occurs to you that you might someday find yourself in a vegetal body (of ivy), seeking the cold embrace of a stone. Excluded, says immediately the thought that brings out from memory turquoise waves breaking at your ankles, as if you were nothing more than a wall of flesh. A warm one.
(Translated by Andreea Teodorescu-Colciu / 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. 
