A thick, deafening fog was coming from all around, swarming him like a feeling of unease and tiredness and confusion that he tried in vain to cover it with logic and stress. He stood still, starring blankly for a while, then looked at his palms, and felt like they were no longer his. Each pore and strand of hair on them felt unfamiliar, each line seemed drawn by someone else. He put his head on her lap and closed his eyes. She remained silent, but her hand started to caress him slowly and pull him back.
(Translated by Irina Bîlcan / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 January 2021, the group has 3.000 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
*Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
