That summer, love struck like a thunderbolt in Ioanid's soul. He was at Dervent, he often went there, he thought he knew his way. He felt like bathing and took off towards the Danube, behind the monastery. That's when he saw her. She was sitting in a boat and her feet were splashing in the water. Ioanid's soul became a sea, a real sea, with storms and stillness, with sunrises and sunsets. He loved, he thought he knew his way. One day, he found the boat empty. In the sand, a strange heart-shaped fruit was wriggling in the sun, crushed by her heel.
(Translated by Alina-Dorina Nicolae / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 June 2023, the group has 11,430 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. 
