Emanoil was an old man when they started coming his way. All kinds, as big as a fist, small enough to fit in a child's chest, chunky or elongated as a wisp, all still twitching with warmth, left on the road. I'm a watchmaker, what should I do with these hearts, he wondered. Then he thought to himself that they were also a sort of clock, they only measured souls, not time. He began to mend them. A spring, a new wheel, and done, tick-tick-tick. Regarding the ones that were going tock-tock, he couldn't do anything about it and left them in God's hands.
(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. 
