He worked on them all day long, shut off in the little workshop. He only wentout on sunny days, to gather a few buckets of light,on rainy days, to collect the roundest raindrops, and when it snowed, to gather the sparkling filigree of snowflakes. He received an abundance of dust from the wings of butterflies and firefly lanterns, all he had to do was ask. When they were ready, he walked out in the middle of the night, placed them in his palm, and blew them off. Light as they were, they flew away, leaving behind a fine dust, and they latched onto the celestial vault, where they shined brightly.
(Translated by Lucia-Alexandra Brînaru-Mitrofan / 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. 
