I usually sleep like a log. But in those three nights, I somehow knew I had to stay awake to watch myself. The first night, someone was painfully squeezing me in a vice. My hands, not knowing how to pray, were twisting and were turning into a tree. A clean ax above the tree. Well, wait, I could hear it on my right shoulder. This is my tree. And an angel's feather tickled my nose. The second and third nights I already knew. A vice, a tree, an ice ax in the air. My angel and I were passing a puff. Shall we quit smoking?
(Translated by Otilia Mocanu / 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. 
