Mrs Leana, short and hunched over, goes to shake out her duvet. Heavy duvet, laden with wool and many generations. She drags it tediously through her sister-in-law's apartment. There, she's on the balcony. Two or three tugs and the duvet's hanging on the wide railing. A durable building, built before the earthquake of '40. The glossy fabric slips and Mrs Leana feels herself begin to levitate, her fingers curling into the woolly corner still in her grasp. The downstairs neighbor walks under the balcony. Wait, I'm coming, shouts Mrs Leana.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Batog / 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. 
