The shootings could be heard closer and closer, it was dark in the house and the heart was beating like crazy. He ran under the table and put a blanket over himself. Through the cracks over his hiding spot, he was trying to see if the special forces agents are barging in. A few bullets have flown around him and stopped in the couch. He wanted to cry, but he was stopping himself, he was a man after all. He heard footsteps in the house and froze. He sharpened his hearing and held his breath. The blanket was ripped off himself.
Damn you child, I told you to stop watching Netflix?
(Translated by Nina Iulia Tufă / 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. 
