When he was a kid, he wanted to be an astronaut; 20 years later he was still dreaming. Suns and stars decorated the walls and ceiling of his room, the solar system he got from Santa Claus was spinning in the corner, his T-shirts were space-themed, and he had a megalist of re-watched sci-fi movies to his credit. He'd flunked out of the OZN College, but listened to Cosmic Love on repeat and loved a girl with green hair. She had dark matter eyes, milky white skin, cerulean nail polish and her name was Venera. Hold me tight babe, we're stopping on Venus; take off that bra.
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / 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. 
