It was dark, drizzling and the street was empty. His feet were slipping on the wet paving and he could hear his heartbeat in his ears. He was running aimlessly. Everything was fast and slow at the same time. He could almost hear the beads of sweat trickling down his back, squeaking. He kept running. They were onto him. He could sense their rotten sweat. A dog was snarling at him on a street corner. At another turning point, he stopped in front of a runaway horse. He fell to the ground and everything became blurry. There was a cold hand on his forehead and a voice saying 'Call 911! He is in withdrawal or he is delirious.'
(Translated by Ioana Oacheşu / 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 March 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. 
