Ivan Filipovici got off the train after 28 hours. He crossed the streets of Irkutsk in his
worn-off opanka shoes and asked everyone about this magical place he had heard about. He paid the two kopecks and entered the dark room. What followed is hard to describe: huge heads appeared and disappeared in front of him. A marching band could be heard singing out of nowhere. Some soldiers kept going up and down some steps. In the end, Ivan Filipovici, drenched in sweat, ran to the first church. Calm, elongated, fixed, the faces of the saints still made sense.
(Translated by Andreea-Simona Trufin / 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 February 2021, the group has 4.300 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. 
