Vasile Cimitiru polished his shoes thoroughly to keep the pace light, filled his bag with dead stars and started to climb the stairs. The higher he climbed, the darker it got. Like fireflies, somewhere in the distance, some old ladies were waiting. They grinded star after star in the big bowl on the sun. They stirred them well with a comet's tail and the darkness grew fainter. They threw in parts of them too, and the potion shook, exploding from place to place in swirls of vivid colour. With a pipette, Vasile, magic only with a pipette.
(Translated by Anca Maria Florea / 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. 
