He would tell them about the ship he sees in the evenings from the hill. It's huge, as big as five churches set side by side, with colourful lights, hollering people and selected music, the black chimney scribbling the sky. They listened with their elbows resting on the dirty mat, among the featherless chickens. One counted his coins in the palm of his hand and bought him another pint, while he went on talking about girls in white dresses sipping liquor from crystal glasses. Today, they are all staring down the dusty alley, waiting for him to appear.
(Translated by Oana Ionescu / 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. 
