I don't know how I got ashore. When I had closed my eyes, I thought it was forever. But my life was barely beginning. Everybody talks about the tranquillity before the storm, but nothing compares with the one you feel after the storm. I don't know for how long I had been lying asleep on the shore. I woke up when someone was moistening my lips with water. The rest of the tribesmen were on their knees, their heads bent down. Further up, protected by some palm trees, it was a huge statue that looked very familiar to me. The man who gave me water shot a glance at my chest. I was lucky that someone had ripped off my
T-shirt.(Translated by Ecaterina Buşe / 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 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. 
