The commissioner looks at me suspiciously. Tell me what happened again. So, I was on my shift since three hours and I hear a strange noise. What kind of noise? Well, a gnashing and then a patter. I run to the monitor and the light is off. What is it, I wonder. I take a lantern and I go to check. I go inside, I look all over, it was all dark, but the exhibits are in place. And where did you get the bump from? I am about to leave and I stumble over The Great Wall. Riding on it, a terracotta soldier was about to run. I shout, he sees me and hits me in the head with a halberd.
(Translated by Diana Simulescu / 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 May 2021, the group has 6.400 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, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
