The Milky Way's milkmaids got caught in the dance foam. They leap to the bottom of the kettle, just as in Ethiopia Kaldi's goats perched on rocks more energetically after eating from the brass berry bush. Beneath their feet the sand vibrates. On their heads are caramel-coloured headbands, and their arms are dipped in steaming mugs. They melt under their own dance. When the kettle boils, they cry softly like birds wandering through the gardens of Semiramis. Dissolved beneath the hot vapour they invite you to taste their bodies.
(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. 
